“You sure you don’t want anything? Another Coke? Chips?” Greene asked again. He made no mention of the lawyer’s letter he’d just read.
“How about you pick my nose?” Larkin held up his bagged hands, like a kid wearing winter mittens. “Want to do it for me?” He laughed.
“We know your buddy Dewey got out of jail four days ago. You didn’t show up for your appointment with your probation officer the next day.”
St. Clair whipped his head up. Greene had his attention now.
For the first time since he’d come in the room, Greene stared back at St. Clair. He pointed a finger at him and raised his voice. “Just like old times, isn’t it. Dewey and Larkin back together.”
Kennicott saw St. Clair’s body go rigid. Greene’s getting to him, he thought.
“You got about five minutes to decide if you want to help us find Booth or not.” Greene was back to looking bored. Even checked his watch.
“You read my lawyer’s letter. I’m not saying squat.”
“Story we’ve got, Dewey’s the shooter,” Greene said, as if he hadn’t heard what St. Clair had just said. “You’re not the gun type.”
St. Clair closed his eyes and turned his head skyward, like a blind man searching the air for sound.
“I’m guessing Booth takes a few potshots at Jet, because he’s going out with his old girlfriend, passes the gun to you, and takes off,” Greene said.
Kennicott knew what Greene was doing. Trying to feed St. Clair a story, with the hopes he’d latch on to it. If he said Booth was the shooter, then, when they arrested Booth, he might put the blame back on St. Clair. When two defendants point at each other, it’s known as a cutthroat defense, and it almost always backfired on both parties. A prosecutor’s dream, and a defense lawyer’s nightmare.
St. Clair was shaking his head hard now. His eyes were still closed. Greene pantomimed a writing gesture with his hand to Kennicott, who nodded and started making notes. He made a point of loudly flipping over a page.
It caught St. Clair’s attention. He opened his eyes and stared at Kennicott. “What the fuck you doing?” He pointed up to the camera with one of his bagged hands. “It’s all on tape. I told you guys, I’m not saying shit.”
Kennicott kept writing.
“You probably owe Dewey a favor,” Greene said. “He took the three-year rap for that drugstore thing, and you got just twelve months and probation. Least you could do is hide the gun.”
St. Clair started breathing hard. “You got no crap putting me and Dewey together.”
“Actually,” Greene said, “the manager who was on shift has already picked both of you out of a photo lineup. You two left behind your coffee cups and we printed them. Bad move. Came out clear as day.”
Again Greene was stretching the truth.
St. Clair swallowed hard.
“We know Dewey’s heading home,” Greene said. “I’m sending Officer Kennicott down to Pelee Island.”
A smart guess by Greene, Kennicott thought.
St. Clair swiveled to look at Kennicott and laughed, like a schoolkid with the giggles. “Good luck. No one knows the island like Dewey. He’s got a million places there to hide.”
Kennicott put his head down and wrote.
It took a moment for St. Clair to realize that he’d just confirmed Booth had been with him at the shooting and had gone back home. “Fuckin’ cops!” he screeched.
Greene shrugged and reached for the door handle. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll tell your best friend you told us where to find him.”
St. Clair bolted to his feet. “I didn’t say a goddamn thing. This is all bullcrap. I don’t know where the fuck he is.”
Kennicott got up to follow Greene out.
“Officer Kennicott will be on the ferry this afternoon,” Greene said. “Thanks for the info.”
“Shit.” St. Clair raised his hands, looked at the bags on them, and in frustration kicked over his chair.
Greene left without turning around.
Kennicott stopped at the door.
St. Clair glared at him. Fury in his eyes. With his back to the camera he mouthed, “You better watch your ass.” The words were crystal clear, as if he’d shouted them at the top of his lungs.
14
“Are you completely out of your crazy-ass criminal mind?” Zelda Petersen, Nancy Parish’s best friend, said the moment she walked into the Pravda Vodka Bar and spied Parish seated alone at a table in back. The Pravda, a trendy bar on Wellington Street, was one of the many downtown watering holes that Petersen frequented. When she found out Parish hadn’t left town, she insisted they meet here at noon for a drink. Amazingly, for Zelda, she was only twenty minutes late. “You could be getting laid on a beach in Mexico right now.”
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Parish said. She was already on her third shot of vodka, and her words were slightly slurred.
Petersen tossed her Burberry Prorsum fur-lined aviator jacket, which cost her two thousand dollars at Holt Renfrew, on a stool and revealed what Parish thought of as typical Zelda work wear: an incredibly short black skirt and outrageously patterned stockings, both of which accentuated her ridiculously long legs, and a terrifyingly tight low-cut top that exposed a wide expanse of her La Perla bra. Not your typical outfit for a top tax lawyer at one of the most conservative firms in the country, but Petersen could get away with it. She was one of a handful of people in Canada who knew the Income Tax Act backward and understood equity derivatives, whatever the hell those were, making her exceedingly valuable. “Instead you take the worst possible case on the planet. Defending a child killer.”
“Alleged child killer.” Parish caught the eye of the cute young waiter who’d been serving her.
“What did your boy toy Kenny from Detroit say?” Petersen asked.
“You mean Karl from Cleveland.” Parish had some vodka left in one of her shot glasses. She downed it in one gulp. “I finally reached him on his cell about an hour ago. I said I could be there in three or four days, and he said don’t bother.”
The young waiter was back at the table. Petersen turned on him before he could say a word. “Two more shots for her and four for me. I’ve got to get caught up.”
He smiled and reached down to pick up the glasses. Parish liked his blue eyes, which he was trying real hard to avert from her friend’s bulging breasts.
“If you can’t get laid, at least you can get hammered,” Petersen said when the waiter was barely out of earshot.
The two friends had met fifteen years ago, on their first day of law school. Students were divided into groups in alphabetical order and led on a library tour. Petersen was a farm girl from a small town, Biggar, Saskatchewan. Her husband, Horst, whom she’d met in high school, was back home planting barley and milking the cows. She hadn’t been on a subway before coming to Toronto and was the only woman who wore a dress.
Halfway through the tour, Petersen shocked Parish when she whispered in her ear: “Want to split and get a drink?” Their unlikely friendship was formed over a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, which they drank all afternoon sitting on the floor of Petersen’s new apartment. She didn’t have any furniture, but she had two tall tumblers with logos on them that read NEW YORK IS BIG BUT THIS IS BIGGAR.
“What are you doing with a name like Zelda?” Parish had asked as they worked their way through the bottle.
“Blame my mom,” Petersen said. “She was an English teacher who got stuck in a shit-ass prairie town. Named me after Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, who, by the way, also loved to drink.”
“And who went mad,” Parish said.
They laughed the intoxicating laughter of new friendship. Within a week Petersen had a whole new wardrobe, within a month she’d given Horst the heave-ho, and by Christmas break she’d slept with two professors and a couple of the married men in the class. She drank copious amounts of alcohol, stood third in the graduating class, and now at the age of thirty-eight was billing out at seven hundred dollars
an hour.
“Did I want a boyfriend in Cleveland anyway?” Parish said, throwing back another shot of vodka. She looked around the bar. Where was that waiter? I mean that cute waiter, she thought.
“Boyfriend, shmoy-friend,” Petersen said. “You take on a case like this, you got to be on your game. How can you do that without regular sex?”
Petersen’s definition of “regular sex” was at least three times a week. Absolute minimum. She loved to brag that fucking, drinking, and billing were her three favorite activities, in that order. A few years before she’d branched out to women. Said it was like having a second car. And it drove her nuts that since Parish’s divorce, Nancy’s sex life had been practically nonexistent.
The waiter was back. He was maybe twenty-five, Parish thought. No, probably younger.
“We’re going to need two more shots each,” Petersen told him. “My best friend’s had a tough morning.”
“Sure.” Mr. Very Cute Waiter smiled.
Parish found herself admiring his butt as he walked away. She tossed back the next drink—what number was that? Fumbling around her six-years-old-and-counting, always overstuffed leather bag, she pulled out her beat-up BlackBerry. “After we talked, Karl, aka Mr. Fuckhead, wrote me an e-mail.” She struggled with the scroll button until she found the message, cleared her throat, and read:
11:15 a.m. Nancy, I understand your devotion to your work, and I admire you for it. But I only get three weeks’ vacation a year and by the time you get down here the week will almost be over.
“I keep telling you, guys are assholes,” Petersen said.
Lately, she’d been trying to convince Parish to switch teams, or just switch-hit. Even offered to set her up with a few women “friends.”
“Can you believe it? He writes me a ‘Dear Nancy’ letter and doesn’t even write ‘Dear,’” Parish said.
“You’re a hopeless romantic,” Petersen said.
“I mean how the fuck can I go out with a guy like that?” The vodka was tasting better and better. Good move, Zelda, ordering two more each. It had been a long time since she’d gotten hammered like this. Larkin was being arrested and processed so there was nothing else she could do. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to go back to the office when she was supposed to be in Mexico.
She checked her watch. Only about one thirty. Look at all the people in this bar. They know how to go out and have fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d left the office before nine at night and here it was the middle of the day and the party had already begun. Why the hell did she work so hard anyway?
The very cute young waiter guy with the great bum arrived with four more shots. Or was it a great butt? Bum. Butt. What was the difference anyhow?
“Why don’t you take him home?” Petersen asked, watching Parish watch him as he moved on again after delivering the drinks. “Girl, you’re going to burn out all those toys I bought you.”
Last March, on Parish’s thirty-eighth birthday, Petersen had given her a hundred-dollar gift bag of assorted sex toys. It had come from a store called the Red Tent Sisters, which described itself in its brochure as “an independent, pro-woman, pro-sex Toronto boutique and wellness centre.”
Parish’s cell phone rang. She looked at the display. It was Awotwe Amankwah, her journalist pal at the Toronto Star. Nobody, not even Zelda, knew about her friendship with him.
They often did each other favors. She’d be an unnamed source when he needed some inside information for a story about a case and he’d plant something in the press to help her out with a trial.
“Hi, Ted. I’m in a very loud bar and can’t talk,” she said into the phone. Amankwah would understand that she was using her partner’s name as a cover. Her head felt woozy.
“Short and sweet,” Amankwah said. “There’s a warrant out for Dewey Booth, your client’s best friend. Cops have got a very good lead.”
The alcohol seemed to drain right out of her. In a second she felt sober as a stone. “Shit.”
“Gets worse for your guy. Last month, Dewey had a new lawyer for his parole hearing. Phil Cutter. Guy’s a snake. You better watch out.”
Cutter and Parish had had a major run-in when he was a Crown Attorney. Now he was a defense lawyer and widely regarded by all as a king-sized asshole. “Thanks.” She felt as if she was going to throw up. She couldn’t tell if this was because of the alcohol or the news. “See you tomorrow at the office.”
“Got another child-killer client?” Petersen asked when Parish hung up. “I’m going to be the last friend you have left before this is over.”
“I’ve got to go,” Parish said.
“Great. Next time you’re leaving that fucking cell phone at home.”
Parish waived Mr. Cutesy Waiter over and insisted on paying the bill. For all her pizzazz, Petersen went through money like water and was constantly, secretly, broke. The waiter processed the bill right in front of them. He angled himself so Petersen couldn’t see what he was doing, wrote something on a card, and passed it to Parish with her receipt.
It said: I’m Brett. Here’s my cell number. I’m off shift at eight.
“I don’t know how you go home alone night after night,” Petersen said.
Parish sneaked the waiter’s card into her back pocket. Bye-bye, Karl from Cleveland; hello, Boy Toy Brett. Petersen was right. This case was about to ramp up another notch, and she was going to need some distraction. To say nothing of the money she’d save on batteries.
15
The downtown bus depot was a place from another time. Steps away from soaring new condos, trendy coffee shops, and high-ceilinged gourmet food stores, it was a remnant of the 1950s Toronto still standing in the spanking downtown core. The tired old building was all gray walls and ceilings, harsh fluorescent light, and the lingering smell of exhaust fumes. Daniel Kennicott took a seat on a hard-backed plastic chair. The place didn’t have one redeeming quality, as far as he was concerned.
Most of the passengers looked tired, the staff worn down. The only real signs of life were the pigeons who fluttered about inside, avoiding the mesh netting and spiked ledges designed to keep them out. The sound of tinny rap music drifted in from the sidewalk, where a bejeweled guy was playing a radio at full volume in his illegally parked Camaro, all his windows down despite the cold.
Kennicott, out of uniform, wore jeans, boots, and a windbreaker, with a lightweight bulletproof vest on underneath. He was waiting for the bus down to Kingsville on the north shore of Lake Erie. There he’d get the boat across to Pelee Island and try to catch up with Dewey Booth.
“You could run down there in a police car,” Greene told him this morning, handing him a large file of background information on Booth. “But a few more hours won’t make a difference. Dollars to doughnuts, he took the bus. Follow in his footsteps.” An open-ended assignment such as this was typical of Greene, who always pushed and challenged him.
Kennicott had sent a copy of Booth’s picture to every bus and train station, airport, and police service in Ontario. Booth didn’t have a passport, but Kennicott alerted the border guards anyway. So far, no one had spotted him. Booth didn’t own a car or have a driver’s license, but to be sure he sent officers to every car rental place in the city armed with Booth’s latest prison photo. No one recognized him.
On the other side of the grimy station windows, his bus pulled into one of the open bays. Toting his knapsack over his shoulder, he headed out the door and joined the line of travelers. The wind whipped through the breezeway and black soot spewed from the rear tailpipe. He found an open seat near the front, and fortunately, no one sat beside him. This made it easier to read through Booth’s file, which he settled into once they were on the road.
Dewey Booth’s mother had been an eighteen-year-old crack addict, and his father was a nasty piece of work who burned the baby with cigarette butts. When he was three years old, Children’s Aid swooped in and he lived in a succession of foster homes, causing more and more trouble
as he grew. He had a particular penchant for torturing animals, and left a succession of injured kittens and puppies in his wake. Then, rather miraculously, when he was nine years old a gay couple, Richard Booth and Aubrey Cooper, who ran a bed-and-breakfast on Pelee Island, stepped in and adopted him. In a report that Kennicott found buried deep in the file, one of the social workers characterized this move as a “Last chance, Hail Mary pass.”
Booth first showed up on the police radar when he was eleven for smashing pumpkins and throwing eggs at neighbors’ windows on Halloween. By the time he was thirteen, he’d already been charged three times. When he was fifteen one of his fathers died swimming offshore when he got caught one night in the undertow. After that his life of crime ramped right up.
At seventeen he was caught slipping out of a high-up window at a youth detention center. Apparently he was a good climber and an even better fighter. He broke the guard’s jaw in three places. “Mr. Booth is suspicious of authority and fearful of abandonment,” the pre-sentence report for the case said. “His personality features uncontrollable anger and rage.” No kidding, Kennicott thought as he flipped through the rest of Booth’s sordid story.
The one positive in Booth’s life seemed to have been his parents. “Yeah, I had two dads,” he told one of the probation officers who prepared yet another report. “Now I’ve just got Rich. He always takes me in.”
Kennicott put the file down and looked out the bus window. Yesterday’s sudden snowfall had petered out, replaced by a dull, sleety rain. A hundred miles south and west of Toronto, the bus left behind the last hint of the Canadian Shield, the great glacial rock that covered much of the northern part of the country. Everything had flattened out. Farms and fields dotted the tabletop landscape. The earth was lying fallow, preparing for its winter hibernation.
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