Victim Impact

by Mel Bradshaw

  We’ll give you a convenient explanation. Take it if you want an easy life. Take it if you think a dead biker is always good news, and you see no point in inquiring further.

  But be aware also that we run our own parallel justice system, and that we always collect on our debts and settle our accounts.

  The we in this case, Ted thought, must be the Dark Arrows, the gang that never flew its colours in public. Thorn had not been killed in what the media had taken to calling “execution style,” with a bullet to the back of the head. That style was more typical of the big international biker federations that didn’t feel threatened by a little publicity.

  Melody had suggested Thorn was indiscreet. Perhaps the Dark Arrows had killed him for sexual shenanigans, or perhaps because he talked too much to the wrong people about gang affairs. But the fact that his truck had been on Ted’s street the night of September 1 prompted another line of speculation. If Thorn had been assigned to steal Ted’s computer and disks, perhaps he had been punished for not having secured the information he had been sent for. Or for having attracted too much heat by killing someone.

  While staring at his full cardboard coffee cup in his booth by the window, Ted entertained the possibility that he had held in his arms the lifeless body of Karin’s murderer, and that more justice had been done her—albeit by a criminal gang—than Ted could have looked for from the courts. Tempting thought! All the more tempting in that Thorn and his family were strangers.

  Yes, but had the right party been punished? Tight-lipped as Nelson had been about the gum left on the stairs, Ted suspected it was Shawn’s. Besides, Ted couldn’t see a man Thorn’s size climbing in through that basement window, whereas for a kid like Shawn it would have been no surprising feat. Scar could have put Shawn up to the burglary and have had Thorn lend his truck. Risky that, though perhaps the gang had felt there were risks also in stealing a vehicle. Possibly Shawn had been instructed to remove the licence plates from the Ford, but because of the rusty bolts, he had tried none too successfully to obscure the numbers with mud instead.

  Beyond the plate glass windows of the service centre McDonald’s, dusk had drawn in. Ted told Markus’s voice mail he’d be eating dinner out, though at present he no more wanted food than company. He had an unpleasant moment when he wondered if, as a result of his encounter with Thorn, the flashbacks to finding Karin were going to start up again. A walk around the darkening parking lot in the cool air returned him to the present, and he climbed into his car feeling less at the mercy of his thoughts, though still uncertain as to what he should do or expect.

  He got to sleep late Friday night and would have slept in late Saturday morning but for a prolonged barrage of door knocking at eight a.m. When the knocking went unanswered, he concluded Markus must have gone for his morning run. Pulling on a dressing gown, Ted got up to answer the door himself. He opened it to find Detective James Nelson on the verandah.

  Ted hadn’t seen the detective since the Labour Day weekend and was surprised at how unwell he looked. Nelson was suffering from the sneezes and sniffles of a head cold. His eyes moved restlessly, as if he were afraid he was missing something. When he started speaking, it was plain he was out of sorts. “Man, you must think we are cretins!”

  “Won’t you come in and sit down?” said Ted.

  In two strides, Nelson was across Markus’s living room and in the compact kitchen. He took a place at the table there without pausing for breath. “Yesterday morning you gave Detective Rodriguez a vehicle description and the letter portion of a licence plate. Are you pretending you aren’t the person that discovered that very vehicle yesterday afternoon in Oxford County?”

  “No,” said Ted, “I’m not.”

  “You have two detectives, Ted—Rodriguez and myself—prepared to take your calls at any hour and use what you’ve got to nail the dirtball that killed your wife. We are on your side, as you ought to know by now.” Nelson whipped a tissue from his jeans pocket and blew his nose. “So why the juvenile call to Crime Stoppers?”

  “Because I messed up the scene. I touched the door handles. I moved the body. I handled the note. I thought if I called you, you’d be just as unhappy with me as you are now.”

  “I’m due for a decongestant tablet. Could I have a glass of water?”

  By the time Ted brought it, Nelson’s blood pressure—or at least his decibel level—had dropped appreciably. “Truth is,” he said, “if that gentleman with the big yellow beard took his own life, there is no crime, and no scene as such.”

  “Think he did?” asked Ted.

  “Other forces will make that determination. Here’s what matters to my investigation. First, if it was murder, not suicide, our boy Shawn Whittaker didn’t do it. He has convincing alibis for any time the pathologist thinks it’s possible for death to have occurred. Second, despite your pawing around, we did find Shawn’s prints in that truck.”

  “None were found in my house,” said Ted. “I thought you’d concluded he wore gloves.”

  “I did, and he probably wore them while driving too. But it’s not so easy to take a CD out of its jewel case and load it with gloves on.”

  “The truck had a CD player?” Ted was becoming aware of his caffeine deficit. “I didn’t notice.”

  “That’s why we were able to read his prints.”

  “So do you have enough to charge him?”

  “I’d like more. And that’s where you come in. If—instead of Crime Stoppers—you’d called me, I’d have had the prints from that truck hours earlier and wouldn’t have had to work literally in the dark. Now you’re going to give me everything you have. And from now on, you’re going to tell me everything you learn as soon as you learn it. Because if you hold out on me again, Ted, I’ll see that this case goes into the freezer. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  But Ted still wasn’t ready to give him Melody. Letting her be turned into the Crown’s key witness against the bikers would be like painting a bull’s eye on her back.

  “So what is your next move?” asked Nelson.

  “Beats me. Offering you a coffee?”

  “If you let me make it.”

  Nelson was making it when the front door banged open. Markus’s post-exertion pants and gasps could be heard even before he appeared in the kitchen wearing a blue-and-yellow exercise outfit and a sheen of sweat. He buried his face in a tea towel. When his eyes had been wiped, they surveyed the detective balefully.

  “Are you preparing something we can drink,” he inquired, “or mixing concrete?”

  Nelson sniffed. “I like it strong, Markus with a K. Add water if you like.”

  “Thank you. Have we laid a charge yet?”

  “Getting closer.”

  Markus took the third and last seat at his kitchen table, the tea towel hung around his neck. “I was thinking,” he said, “that if you found Ted’s computer, it might be useful evidence.”

  “We’ve executed search warrants at Shawn Whittaker’s home and at his mother’s store, not to mention all the pawn shops and known fences we’ve checked out. Nada. Ted thinks the computer was stolen for a biker gang, but neither my force nor the OPP have caught up with them yet. What do you suggest?”

  “It sounds to me as if these bikers didn’t want a computer. They wanted to know what Ted had on his computer about them. When they discovered there wasn’t anything in the computer, I’m wondering if they mightn’t have let Shawn keep it, on the understanding that if he was caught with it, he was on his own, and he’d better not bring them into it.”

  “So where did Shawn hide it?” said Nelson. “Did he dig a hole and bury it?”

  “Karin told me—I forget in what context—that one of the boys at the gas bar volunteered in a—can we pour that now?”

  “Volunteered in a what?” asked Ted. This was all news to him.

  Markus made them wait while the coffee was thinned.

  “Volunteered,” said Markus when he was good and ready, “in a thri
ft shop. His mother’s notion of the type of community service best suited to his talents, or some such thing. I’ve seen computers for sale in such places, but I’d never think of buying one, nor would most of the customers. No hook-up instructions. No guarantees. You’d have to be a geek to give them a second look.”

  “You’re suggesting one of the Whittakers donated my computer to a thrift shop?” said Ted.

  “Nothing so philanthropic. But maybe he’s storing it there till the heat dies down.”

  “And if some geek bought it in the meantime . . . ?” asked Nelson.

  “It was just a thought,” said Markus. “Anyone want eggs?”

  While he was cooking them, Nelson worked his cellphone.

  “Meryl Whittaker,” he presently announced, “says her son Shawn volunteers at the Fair Share Shop in Meadowvale Town Centre. Who’s coming?”

  After breakfast, Ted dressed and climbed into the front passenger seat of Nelson’s unmarked Impala.

  The Fair Share occupied a hangar-like space at one corner of a vast shopping plaza. The shop had the smell of all second-hand clothes, no matter how many times washed. Ted and the detective made their way down aisles of blouses and bed linens, sneakers and slacks. Then there were the kitchen appliances—toasters with fraying cords, microwave ovens with cracked glass in the doors. The computers were balanced on shelves along the back walls. Ted recognized a Compaq Armada laptop from the mid-to-late nineties and even a Mac Plus desktop from the eighties. He saw nothing, however, that looked like his Dell XPS 700 and told Nelson so. This was enough to send the detective looking for the senior person on shift. She proved to be a middle-aged blondish woman with a butch haircut. On her denim vest she wore a name tag that identified her as Lu and a large round orange and blue button that read, SHOW CARING THRU SHARING. Nelson showed his badge and asked to see the backroom.

  “Sure thing,” said Lu. There was a smoker’s rasp to her voice. “Just watch your step.”

  The clothes in the backroom had, from their smell, not all been washed. A couple of old top-loading machines were working on it, but the size of the piles on the floor promised a long campaign. In this room too, there were shelves of dated and suspect hardware. Ted started working his way along them.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” Lu asked.

  “Do you have a volunteer here named Shawn Whittaker?” said Nelson.

  “Uh-huh. He’s not in right now.”

  “Did he bring in a computer sometime this month?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. It should be on that shelf, waiting to be priced. Keep looking. Some of the machines are behind others.”

  Ted kept looking.

  “Where did he get this computer?” asked Nelson.

  “Beats me. We’ve got enough to worry about—sorting and selling—without finding out where all the stuff comes from. A lot of it is just dropped off in a box at the door, and there’s no one to ask anyway.”

  “Here it is,” said Ted, wondering how he could be so sure. The equipment was too new to be distinguished by any scratches, coffee stains or sticky keys. And yet he believed he was going on something more than the unlikelihood of any other computer like his finding its way here. It gave him no joy that from now on it was going to be much harder to hope for Shawn’s innocence. “In behind,” he added, “as you said. And it has a SOLD sticker on it.”

  “Now that’s something I do object to,” Lu grumbled. “I’ve told the staff it’s strictly cash and carry. We’re not a storage depot. You buy it—you take it with you.”

  Nelson came over to look at the computer. He matched the serial number against the one he had written in his notebook, the one Ted had given him the night of the break-in.

  “How could it have been bought,” said Ted, “if it hadn’t even been priced?”

  “Whoever put the sticker on will have to answer that one. Until I talk to the staff, I’ve no idea who that was.”

  Nelson got Lu to give him her last name and the names of the store employees and volunteers.

  “And what kind of person is Shawn Whittaker, Ms. Moscovitch? How do you find him?”

  “Smooth. Most of the people here are well-meaning but rough-edged. Shawn’s easy to deal with because he’s never out of sorts. He doesn’t have good work habits, but that’s par for the course around here. I usually have to ask four to six times if I want something done. In that respect, he’s pretty average.”

  Chapter 10

  Shawn Whittaker felt important as never before, and scared. Things weren’t going well. It looked like they wouldn’t for a long time. Between the Peel cops’ interrogations, he had lots of time to think of how it could all have gone better.

  The night Scar had motored into Shawn’s life on his panhead bobber had promised so much glamour. Scar inspired confidence. Whenever they talked at the Handy Buy, Shawn felt himself capable of more. Not that he was in awe of Scar. Shawn thought he was just as cool as the biker. It was just that if you were a superior person, you wanted others of your kind around you. You thrived in their company. The rest of the human race, whether they were strangers or your family, just dragged you down.

  The job Scar had proposed had sounded easy. The house was already one Shawn had his eye on. He knew the security company sign was a leftover from the previous owner, and he knew when the couple would be away. Why did that freaky woman have to go changing her plans without telling him? Yeah, that would have saved her and him some grief. Just a simple phone call: Shawn, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to the cottage Friday night after all. I’ll be sleeping in the city. As if.

  Killing her hadn’t been in the program. Scar had thought it pretty uncool; that was a minor point, though, as Scar hadn’t been there. A bigger point was that Shawn liked the woman. She was friendly, not boring. And she was hot in an older sort of way. Shawn was definitely going to miss her. The need to kill her was a drag.

  The killing, on the other hand, once he’d really accepted the idea—the power to do that . . . Yeah, that had been great. Looming up before her in that tiny vestibule. The startled look on her freckled face. Something told Shawn she was afraid of those cellar stairs. The panic in her eyes pointed to them, drew them to his attention, so of course he had to push her down them. It seemed natural, easy, what the situation called for.

  Damned thing was she wouldn’t fall. She kept her balance, however closely he crowded her, however hard he pushed. She always managed to get a steadying hand on the rail. Not until the very bottom did he manage to trip her, get her pinned to the basement floor. Now she looked like a proper victim, though she still hadn’t cried out at all. She gave up her chance for last words, and Shawn did what the fall had been supposed to do—crack her skull like a nut.

  He still had nightmares about it, but when he was awake and had his head together, he felt extra mature. Had Scar ever broken open anyone’s cranium? Shawn had. He was in the major leagues.

  Scar didn’t like that there’d been a murder, and he didn’t like it that neither the computer nor the disks had what Scar wanted. Still he’d let Shawn have both the computer and X tabs with a street value of six hundred dollars or more. Enough to get him started in a new career. When he had enough for a condo of his own, he’d go back to the Fair Share and pick up his computer to put in it. Shawn counted himself a natural for the rave scene. He was young. He’d be accepted much more easily by the teenaged ravettes than a whiskery old guy like Scar would be.

  And XTC was a safe drug. Except that it was supposed to make you love everyone, which was the last thing Shawn wanted. But safe in the sense that users rarely died, and only if they were stupid enough to let their bodies overheat or if they drank too much water. Shawn didn’t want to push drugs that killed people. That would attract too much attention from the police.

  Bad break about the undercover babe in the Falls. He’d seen the lines around her eyes but just thought she partied too hard. As soon as he was nabbed, he decided he wasn’t going to talk.
He liked to talk, so it was going to be difficult and no fun either.

  He did ask “to retain and instruct counsel”—by now having the caution down pat. He considered applying for legal aid but was afraid they’d ask him to sell his Harley. He had no inclination to do that and couldn’t legally in any case on account of the missing serial numbers. So he ended up phoning the well-meaning old dork who’d represented him in youth court.

  Shawn remembered Fred Fanning as a tired-looking baldie in his sixties, who had been easing himself out of criminal work. His ambition, Shawn had heard him say, was to move into something quieter like wills. He wore shapeless suits and white shirts that always looked as if they were struggling to make it through their second day. Maybe a more aggressive partner wore them on day one.

  Fred Fanning thought that Shawn would find it hard to beat the trafficking charge: seventeen tabs were found on him and he’d nothing to bargain with if he persisted in refusing to say where the ecstasy had come from. On the other hand, bail shouldn’t be a problem. This was Shawn’s first offence as an adult, and as a young offender he’d always shown up for his court dates and kept his nose clean before them.

  Fanning hoped Shawn didn’t expect him to drive down to the Falls that night. Shawn said not to rush. It would be soon enough if he made it to the bail hearing in the morning. In the meantime, Shawn planned to drink the police coffee and smoke their cigarettes while telling them nothing.

  He pretty well thought they’d given up trying to pump him by the time the black dude named Nelson arrived. Shawn sort of thought he must be a policeman, or what would he have been doing there? But he didn’t ask to see a badge. Nelson, who wore a silver chain Shawn coveted at first sight, looked in turn with interest at Shawn’s hoodie. Maybe he’d never before seen the colour, which was called asphalt—and which, to Shawn’s mind, was even less visible than black at night.