She eyed him levelly. “I thought we were talking about Jonathan Blair.”
“Jonathan Blair always seems to be the least important person in my conversations about him.”
Her eyes narrowed intently as she inspected the idea. “What a curious observation,” she said. “But you know, it’s quite true. When Jonathan first came, he created quite a stir. I mean, he had a lot of star qualities—loads of money, good looks, brains, an impressive integrity. But in a way, drama plays around him. He’s always rock stable, calm, unobtrusive.”
“Like the eye of a hurricane, maybe?”
She laughed. “My God, you’re a great improvement over the detective who was here this morning. So plodding and unimaginative. ‘Do you know anyone who had reason to kill him? When did you last see him? Did he ever say anything that led you to think he was in trouble?’”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Nothing useful. I’ve been wracking my brains. We all have! But it’s beyond me. Unless he was murdered because he was too perfect. Kind of like Christ.”
“It’s been suggested that Difalco might have done it.”
She snorted. “Why, because of Raquel Haddad? That’s ridiculous. Jonathan wasn’t involved with Raquel.”
Green remembered a snatch of the conversation between Rosalind and Difalco and took a wild guess. “But Difalco thought he was.”
She shook her head. “It still doesn’t fit. Maybe Raquel got to Joe more than most, but no woman would ever mean enough that he would kill for her. To him, women are just playthings.”
More likely possessions, Green thought, and remembered the grisly aftermath of domestic violence wrought by men who thought like that. But he kept the memories to himself.
“Jonathan’s ex-girlfriend thinks Difalco might have been jealous of Jonathan for other reasons.”
Rosalind shrugged. “Well, she could be right. Vanessa’s even more cynical of people than I am, especially when she’s hurting. But I’ve been burnt trusting people I shouldn’t, so who’s to say? Certainly of all of us, Joe is the one with the fewest scruples. I’m not sure he’s a murderer, but he sure as hell would sell his grandmother for a piece of fame and glory.”
Privately Green thought that the crushing indictment of Joe Difalco by Rosalind Simmons and Vanessa Weeks revealed more about the women’s own psyches than it did about Difalco’s. There was a hint of fascination in the disgust. It made him very curious to get the man under his own microscope to see what a male’s reaction to him would be.
But when he finally dismissed Rosalind Simmons and emerged into the hall, Joe Difalco was nowhere to be found.
Five
The ten detectives had been waiting almost an hour by the time Green burst through the briefing room door, dishevelled and out of breath. Previous experience had prepared Sullivan for this likelihood, however, and he had used the time to get progress reports from the teams and to chart the useful information on the blackboards around the room. By this time he had been awake for twenty-eight hours, aside from catnaps in Green’s chair, and he was almost beyond fatigue. Artificially propped up by caffeine, he moved like a well-trained automaton, struggling to remain coherent. It took him more than twenty minutes to summarize for Green all the evidence to date.
Or lack of it, for it was a dismal harvest.
Hundreds of students had volunteered information, but not one could provide useful eyewitness testimony. No one had seen the stabbing, no one had heard it. The killing had been quick and neat, committed without hesitation or warning.
“We should be looking for a goddamn commando,” Green muttered grimly; the neatness bothered him. Amateur killers made mistakes. They didn’t know where to strike. They hesitated, blundered, panicked. They allowed screams and blows in self-defence. To have foreseen all the problems and taken steps against them, this suggested a professional who had killed before and for whom murder was a practised art. But that meant researching Marianne Blair’s possible connections to the underworld, which would not go down well with her pal the Police Chief. Besides, the mob didn’t operate this obliquely. If they had a message to deliver, they made it loud and clear. Marianne Blair had received no threats prior to the murder, and no one had come forward to claim responsibility. Thus, there was no evidence to suggest Jonathan was being used as a pawn in a settling of accounts.
There was, however, evidence that something was very wrong in his own life. His friends described him as moody and preoccupied. Usually gentle and agreeable, he had become impatient and irritable. He wouldn’t go out with them, he wouldn’t join in the laughter and the jokes. He had broken up with his girlfriend without telling anyone why. He had spent hours locked away in his lab, pouring his energies into his dissertation but rebuffing all sympathetic inquiries into how it was going. His friends assumed he had hit a major snag in his research, but Dr. Halton assured the detectives everything had been proceeding normally.
Inquiries into his love life had yielded mixed views. Some friends thought he had been embroiled in a passionate, secret affair with Raquel Haddad, but others stubbornly refused to believe it. He had been seen with her but always at arm’s length. No one knew in what capacity she had been helping him with his research, because he avoided talking about the subject altogether.
The search of Jonathan’s university office had failed to produce a wallet or a diary, but had yielded an appointment/ address book as well as a bank book. Jonathan Blair had a savings account with a healthy four-figure balance, but there was nothing alarming in the pattern of small withdrawals and deposits which peppered the previous month. If he were into drugs, it was minor league. The toxicology screen which had been rushed through the RCMP forensics lab had revealed no trace of drugs in his body, and MacPhail’s conclusion from the autopsy was the same. All Jonathan had in his body were the remains of cola and a grilled cheese sandwich, consumed about three hours before the stabbing.
“All right, that means he ate some supper at about seven o’clock,” Green broke in, rescuing Sullivan, whose eyes had begun to close. Green moved to an empty blackboard and turned to look at his teams. “Let’s put together his last day. He got up and had breakfast with his mother at seven a.m., then left for the university on his bike at ten to eight. Does anyone know what happened next?”
Laplante flipped open his notebook. “We’ve tracked most of his day at work. Dr. Halton’s secretary said he arrived at his office just before nine o’clock and asked her if Halton was coming in that day. She said he was in Toronto, and he asked when was the earliest time he could see him. She said first thing tomorrow. That’s today, of course.”
“What was his state of mind at that point?” “The secretary said he seemed upset that he couldn’t see Halton till the next day.”
“Upset how? Distraught?”
Laplante shrugged. “She just said upset. She didn’t say he freaked out. He thanked her for the appointment and went off down to his office.”
“Alone?”
“I guess. His computer shows he was logged on from then till twelve-fifteen. It looks like he worked for three hours straight.”
“Doing what?” “Oh hell, Mike, Jackson and I didn’t try to figure that out. There were print-outs of graphs and numbers and tables all over his desk. His walls are covered with diagrams of the brain, and he has a big, multi-coloured plastic model of one sitting on his desk. There’s photographs of cats with pink stuff stuck on their head and wires coming out. Gave me the willies.”
“What did he do from noon till five?”
“He was in the lab working with the poor suckers. One of the other guys—Dr. Difalco—showed us around the place and it’s full of high-tech crap. Computers, scanners, videos, machines that measure eye blinks and foot twitches and brain waves…”
“Hard-ons too, I bet,” came a faceless voice from the table, and laughter rippled through the room. Sullivan’s eyes fluttered open.
Laplante grinned and livened up for the group. “Shit, Difalco kept ratt
ling off these long names. and he just lost me. All I can tell is everything you want to measure about someone, inside or out, it seems like you can measure nowadays. Different parts of the brain are working during different tasks, and Dr. Difalco said you can see what parts are working with these new machines. Colours in one part, shapes in another, put colours and shapes together and you get another part going.”
“Sounds like you got a new career out there when the budget cuts come, Laplante,” one of the detectives quipped.
Laplante shook his head. “I’d go squirrelly in one of those little rooms day after day staring at a computer screen. And tempers do get hot. One of the guys told me Difalco and Miller got into a fight one day two or three months ago and nearly killed each other. Broke a computer in the heat of it, and Miller could hardly get out of bed for a week. Difalco’s some kind of martial arts pro. They’re still not talking to each other.”
Green perked up. This incident hadn’t been mentioned in the detective’s report, because in the average investigator’s mind it had no direct relevance to the victim or to the time frame in question. But it was exactly the type of peripheral detail which might open up an entire new line of inquiry. The type of peripheral detail on which Green’s mind took wing.
“What was it about?” he demanded.
“It was all hushed up,” Laplante said. “Halton’s a guy who doesn’t stand for nonsense. Difalco’s files went missing, and Miller accused him of making them up, so Halton hauled both guys into his office and laid down the law, and I guess nobody else found out the whole story. “
“You’ve met both men. Who do you think is guilty?”
Laplante glanced across at Jackson for support. Neither seemed to have given the matter much thought. Finally, Laplante gestured lamely. “These guys are a little different from the kind of suspect we usually meet on the street, Mike. This Dr. Difalco acts more like the slime we see, but maybe Miller is just a more sophisticated kind of creep.”
“Difalco—who said he was a doctor?”
“Well, he—” Laplante broke off, puzzled. “We just thought…I think he just acted like one. And he never said we were wrong.”
I’ll just bet he didn’t, Green thought. His brief encounter with the man had not left him impressed by his integrity. Difalco remained high on his list of witnesses to be interviewed, along with Myles Halton. But for now he had to focus on the results of the investigation to date so that he could figure out where his men should go from there.
He sat in silence for two minutes, his eyes flitting from one blackboard to another, groping for a toehold. After hours of interviews and mountains of evidence, they had so few usable facts. The killing was perfect—no witness, no sound, no mess, no physical evidence left behind. The victim was perfect, not even his ex-girlfriend hated him. No drugs, no money problems, no hint of scandal. The only glimmer of suspicion was a dark-haired beauty who may have been his mistress and who had abruptly vanished to Beirut only hours before his death. Raquel Haddad was his only toehold, except for the unknown student who had been up in the library at the time of the murder and who had vanished in the confusion following the alarm.
He assigned one team to track down the activities of Raquel and Pierre Haddad and another to continue the search for the red-shirted student. The third team was to pursue the routine inquiry into Blair’s known associates and their activities on the day of the murder, while the remaining team was to continue piecing together Blair’s final day, in the hopes of finding out what had brought him to the remote medieval literature section of the library.
Ferreting out the intrigue surrounding Difalco, Miller and the missing files, he left for himself. It was past five o’clock, only an hour before Sharon left for work, but he still had two major witnesses to interview before he could even consider calling it a day. Not to mention the phone messages from Peter Weiss and the Deputy Chief, demanding a progress report. If he were lucky—really lucky—he’d get home in time for Tony’s bedtime story.
But there was no one else he could trust with the Difalco-Miller mystery except Sullivan, who by now was propped up against the wall in the corner, snoring softly. His face was grey with fatigue, and when Green shook him, he seemed to struggle back to consciousness from very far away. He rubbed his square hand over his face.
“What do you want me to do?” he managed thickly.
“Go home, see your family and sleep till morning.”
Sullivan shook his head. “I just need a couple of hours. Mary’s out tonight showing a house for once anyway. First nibble she’s had all month. I’ll just go home, put the boys to bed, and meet you wherever later.”
Green chuckled. “I’m babysitting Tony, remember? Calling it a night early. I thought you’d approve.”
“I do, I do. But wait till Tony starts to want hockey camp, and his baby sister needs a costume for her ballet recital. You’ll be glad for every overtime hour you can get.”
“Brian, you’re no good to me asleep on your feet. I only have a couple of small things to do, and the sooner I get on them, the sooner I can get home too.”
He pointed Sullivan in the direction of the elevator, watched him weave down the hall, then turned to collect his notes for the interviews. Two hours tops, he thought. But just as he was heading past his office on his way back outside, he was intercepted by the Chief of Detectives.
“Update, Michael.”
“Adam, I have to—” “Two minutes. Your office.” Adam Jules steered him towards the door. Once inside, Green glanced at him sharply.
“Is this for your ears or someone else’s?”
“Mine. I’ll give a one-minute version to Lynch.”
Green smiled. “Nothing solid yet, but some leads. It looks personal, probably something to do with his love life. Can you get the Mounties and Immigration to give us all they’ve got on a Pierre and Raquel Haddad?” He jotted down the addresses.
Jules’ eyebrow shot up. “An Arab connection? Political?” Green shook his head. “I don’t think so, but the RCMP can ask around. Then Lynch can bug them for a change.” He chuckled. “That ought to keep him busy.”
Jules managed his approximation of a smile. “I’ve had several calls from Marianne Blair’s ex, Jonathan’s father. He’s just arrived in Ottawa. Do you want to see him?”
“Does he know anything useful?”
“He says no. Lives in Vancouver, only sees Jonathan every few months.”
“Find out where he’s staying and tell him I’ll see him there at—” Green glanced at his watch and swore. One hour to see Halton, another to see Difalco, minimum. If he added Mr. Blair Senior to the list, he’d be lucky even to tuck Tony in. Sharon would kill him. “Tell him eight o’clock.”
“He won’t like that. He’s pretty upset. Only learnt the news from the TV.”
“Huh. That tells us where Mrs. Blair’s priorities lie, doesn’t it,” Green noted drily. “She gave me the impression she was still fond of the guy, they just couldn’t work things out.” He shrugged. “Well, you don’t get rich by being nice, do you? Tell the guy I’m sorry, but I’ll give him a personal report at eight o’clock. By then, once I’ve seen Professor Halton and his hot-tempered golden boy, I hope I’ll have something to report.”
Six
Green had intended to pay a surprise visit to Myles Halton at his home, a tactic which he liked because witnesses had no time to mount a defence. But as he steered the Corolla onto the Queensway towards Constance Bay, where the renowned and wealthy professor had his waterfront getaway, an alternative struck him. He could kill two birds with one stone if Halton met him at the University. In order not to lose the element of surprise entirely, he dispatched a police cruiser to pick Halton up.
At seven in the evening, the offices of Halton’s team were even more deserted than they had been that morning. The secretary had gone home, and most of the lights in the hall and reception area had been turned off, leaving only hazy yellow splashes at intervals down the hall to g
uide the cleaning staff. The chatter of Green’s police radio was deafening in the silence. He was just reaching for the light switch by the secretary’s desk when he heard a distant crash. He paused, straining his eyes to see down the hall. The security guard downstairs had told him everyone from Halton’s floor had gone home. All the doors were shut and dark. From down the hall came a screech of metal, like an unoiled wheel. Then a soft rustling, barely audible even in the tomb-like silence of the building.
Green dropped down behind the desk, turned his radio down and fumbled beneath his jacket for his gun. He hated it. Hated carrying it and hoped he never had to fire it except on the range, but the rule book and every instructor he’d ever had said that one day he’d be grateful he had it. Clairvoyant bastards. Green stared at the gun lying cold and alien in his hand, then cautiously lifted it in front of him. For a moment he crouched behind the desk, his heart thumping and his mind racing as he tried to organize his thoughts. He had always been a lousy policeman. A good detective, but useless on the front lines. If Jules had not yanked him off the street into CID fourteen years ago, he would have been kicked off the Force within a year. He never followed procedure and rarely worked within the team.
Now, as he crouched low and took deep breaths to slow his heart, he tried to remember those basic procedures. He had surprised an intruder in a deserted office complex after hours. An office where a recent murder victim had worked and where a lot of questions remained unanswered. He could not tell from the muffled sounds how many intruders there were nor in which office they were working. Procedure dictated that he call for back-up. Otherwise he would be crucified by the Professional Standards Unit if things went wrong. If he were still alive to be crucified.
On the other hand, the intruder might hear his voice if he used his radio to call for back-up. It was also possible that the intruder was merely a researcher working late, in which case he would be a laughingstock. Among the muffled sounds, he could hear nothing resembling voices, so it was possible there was only one intruder. With only one intruder and the element of surprise on his side, surely he could gain the upper hand in a confrontation.
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