Do or Die

by Barbara Fradkin

  The suspect was racing back and forth across the roof, peering over the edge as if searching for an escape route. The only exit was the rooftop door through which he had obviously come. Below, the police officers had sealed off the street exits and now stood gazing up at the building façade uncertainly.

  Green grabbed his radio and called Sullivan. “Brian, he’s on the roof.”

  “I’ve got a call in to the tactical unit.”

  The suspect had abandoned his aimless running and was turning back towards the rooftop door.

  “No time,” Green said. “He’s going back into the building, and that means potential hostages and a half-dozen exits you might not know about. You’ve got to get up there right away.”

  Green saw Sullivan beckon to three officers and head into the building. “I’m on my way up,” Sullivan said breathlessly. “What’s his position?”

  “He’s still there, but he’s thinking about the door. Quick!” Down below, the ambulance and more squad cars converged on Miller’s apartment. The response to my 911 call, Green thought. He took one last quick glance at Miller and saw with relief that his breathing had not changed. Across the way, the suspect was reaching his hand towards the door. Time had run out.

  Green crashed a chair through the window and pulled out his gun. “Police, freeze!”

  The man jerked back and spun around, his hand shielding his eyes from the floodlight as he searched the darkness. Green kept his gun trained on him. “Put your hands on your head and back away from the door.”

  The man hesitated. Green gauged the distance from his window to the rooftop across the way. At least seventy-five feet. To his surprise, the gun was remarkably steady in his hand, but there was no way he was going to hit the man if he fired. If he could even bring himself to fire. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. He’d never fired at a live target, and never hit anything at seventy-five feet.

  But the suspect didn’t know that.

  “Back away. Right now!” Green bellowed, and to his great relief the suspect slowly turned away. Green had just begun to breathe again when abruptly the man launched himself toward the edge of the roof. Shit! In that instant Sullivan burst through the rooftop door, took a running leap in pursuit, and brought them both crashing to the ground.

  Behind him, Green heard a commotion as the paramedics rushed into Miller’s room. After briefing them on the Elavil, he turned back to the window. Sullivan was just hauling the suspect to his feet and hustling him toward the door. Handcuffed and dwarfed by Sullivan, the suspect looked fragile and harmless. Not like a deadly killer at all.

  “Brian!” Green called. “Take the wig off.”

  Sullivan glanced over at him questioningly, then reached down to snatch the black wig from the man’s head. A mass of pale blond locks slowly tumbled over the suspect’s face.

  “Gotcha, Miss Weeks,” Green said to himself with a smile of satisfaction.

  Fifteen

  “My father’s on his way up here, you know. You don’t know trouble till you’ve met Dr. Lorrimer Weeks.”

  Vanessa Weeks sat in the interrogation room, her arms crossed over her chest and her chin thrust out. Gone was all trace of the panic that had driven her to contemplate suicide. Her eyes were steady and her tone sure. A damn good actress, Green thought, remembering her convincing portrayal of grief when he’d first met her. Only her pallor betrayed her fear. She had been booked and had spent the rest of the night in a tiny metal cell, but that seemed only to strengthen her resolve.

  “I look forward to it,” Green replied, tipping his chair back casually. “Would you care to explain what you were doing at Dave Miller’s apartment last night?”

  “I was worried. I went there to check on him.”

  “I see. Disguised in black wig and mustache.”

  “It’s a dangerous building. I thought I’d be safer as a man.”

  “And the little detour up onto the rooftop on your way home?”

  “There’s no law against going up on a roof. If that’s all you’ve got on me—“

  “What about Jonathan’s wallet and the sketch Carrie MacDonald drew of him? My men found them in the back of your bedroom closet. How did they get there?’

  She said nothing.

  “They’re a poor substitute for the real thing, by the way. They won’t love you back.”

  Her knuckles whitened, but she feigned disdain. “My father says he’ll get that whole search thrown out of court, you’ll see. You had no probable cause when you broke into my apartment.”

  He smiled. “Well, he can try, but judges up here are not that easily bullied. There was a life in danger and that Elavil prescription was in plain view, so the law’s on my side. As for Jonathan’s death, your alibi stinks. I had a female officer check out that university pool where you were supposedly doing laps. She was able to sneak in and out the back door of the change room with no trouble.”

  “Just because she could doesn’t mean I did, Inspector. I believe I’m still innocent until proven guilty, even in this provincial backwater.”

  He sat forward in his chair, a cup of cold coffee forgotten at his elbow. He had been up all night, but he felt more alive than he had in days. His eyes held hers quietly as he played his ace.

  “I saw Dave Miller this morning. He was still pretty groggy, but he wanted to tell me about his discovery. He’d found a new Danish book which showed yet another method of analyzing brain wave data that gives even different results. So maybe all three of you were picking up different parts of brain activity and Difalco’s theory doesn’t contradict Miller’s after all. Both theories could be right. Or wrong. Quite amazing, isn’t it, how little we really know?”

  She had resolutely held his gaze, but now red flooded her cheeks. Her arms tightened across her chest as if she were trying to hold herself together.

  “That’s a lie!” she spat. “I looked at that book and I—” Belatedly, she caught herself and clamped her jaw tight.

  “You didn’t read to the end. It was the last paper in the book.”

  She began to shake all over. “I’m not talking any more. Get out! Get the fuck out!”

  Without warning she leaped up and flung herself against the door, bringing two police officers racing into the room. It took both of them to subdue her, and her curses echoed in the hall long after they had dragged her away.

  * * *

  “Boy, what a waste!” Sullivan exclaimed, shaking his head in disbelief. “A kid like that, with so much going for her, so much to contribute, and she’s going to spend her best years behind bars.”

  After a few hours sleep and a fresh shave, Sullivan was in top form again but the long emotional night had finally taken its toll on Green. Slumped at his desk, he rubbed his eyes wearily.

  “Yeah, she has a great mind, but people never saw beyond that, to the young woman who needed love and affirmation just like the rest of us. Perhaps even more than the rest of us. She’d been raised in a hothouse, made to grow up before her time, always expected to excel, to win, to be number one. The pressure was incredible. You know, rumour has it she broke her own wrist when she saw she had no chance of winning gold in tennis at the Olympics. That’s how abhorrent losing was to her. I should have realized she wouldn’t relinquish Jonathan Blair as easily as she seemed to.”

  “But she killed him because of the research, Mike, not because he’d dumped her.”

  “I think both things went together. I don’t think she planned to kill him at first. She just wanted Raquel out of his life, so she planted the love note for the Haddads to find. The sad thing is, I don’t think Jonathan was as involved with Raquel as Vanessa thought. He just felt sorry for her because no one ever saw beyond the great body.”

  Sullivan guffawed. “You saw Raquel’s picture. You honestly think Blair wasn’t attracted?”

  “Sure, he was attracted. In the heat of the moment he might even have slept with her. But what I mean is—it wasn’t…” Green coloured. “It didn’t m
ean anything. I think he really broke up with Vanessa because he suspected she might be involved in the research fraud. Then, somehow Vanessa found out he was investigating the fraud. My guess is on Sunday when she was in his office preparing the love note on his computer, she stumbled upon the data in his computer and she realized she was about to be exposed. I suspect she followed him around after that, trying to keep tabs on him and learn more about what he knew. Maybe she overheard him ask for a meeting with Halton, and knew she had to move. Her lucky break was to witness the fight between Jonathan and the Haddad brothers, and that gave her the idea for the frame. If she hadn’t seen it, she would have figured out another way to kill him. Whatever it took, Jonathan Blair had to be eliminated before he met with Halton the next day.”

  “Yeah, but what about the knife? How’d she get it so fast? Last I heard, Gibbs checked all the gift shops and came up empty.”

  Green pawed through the papers on his desk, sending several skidding onto the floor. He pounced on one with a grin. “Gibbs, bless his obsessive-compulsive soul, didn’t give up, and I have taught him well. Lateral thinking, that’s what he used. He decided to check Middle Eastern restaurants, and what do you know! The Moroccan Nights on Bank Street found it was missing one of the decorative daggers that hang on the wall.”

  Sullivan shook his head. “Boy, what a cold cookie. To love the guy and wipe him out like that over some research—that’s pretty warped.”

  “Yeah, and I think that’s why she finally snapped. Ambition and success meant more to her than people. She’d defied her father in choosing Halton instead of Harvard, so she had a lot to prove. In the academic world you prove yourself by the significance of your research. You don’t win a Nobel Prize by being wrong. Vanessa’s work was based on Miller’s theory. She thought Difalco’s results contradicted Miller’s and so put hers in question too.”

  “So it was her all along, not Miller, who tampered with Difalco’s data.”

  Green nodded. “Difalco had almost finished his data collection, and naturally, he was beginning to crow. I think she got worried and ran some simulations of his work. When she found out his results were good, she broke into his raw data and altered his numbers. Then she suggested to Miller he run simulations, and of course the results weren’t at all what Difalco claimed. And the rest is history. Miller checked Difalco’s raw data, yelled fraud, Vanessa erased the data and Difalco yelled sabotage. If only she’d realized, as Miller did, that both theories could be right. Or both wrong. And that truth is the only important player in the drama.”

  “Yeah. But sometimes you get too close to things. Get too committed, lose sight of the big picture. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, right?” Sullivan hauled himself to his feet and stretched luxuriously. “Well, I’m taking the day off, going to rebore the engine on the old Chev. Maybe it’ll last another winter. By the way, Mary says that little house you two were looking at in Barrhaven has dropped its price. It’s a steal now, she says.”

  Green avoided Sullivan’s eyes. At this moment, even Barrhaven would be preferable to the future he faced. He’d just called home for the seventh time, and there was still no answer. “Yeah, well…”

  “Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise? Sharon didn’t like the press coverage?”

  “Something like that. Plus I’ve been a self-centred ass.”

  “So what’s new? She knew that when she married you.” Green cast him a reproachful look. “Yeah, but I’ve sunk to new lows since the baby was born.” He traced slow circles on the desk with his pen. “Almost as if…when it was just Sharon and me, I knew I could always walk away. She’d be hurt, but we’d both find someone else. But with Tony—”

  “You’re his father for life.”

  “That’s the thing. I should be.” Green paused, thinking of Hannah. “And I’ve been wondering…it’s almost like I want to hold him away from me. To tell him ‘Don’t expect too much of me so I won’t fail you’. To insulate him.” And maybe to insulate myself a bit too, he added but only to himself, for that was a frailty Sullivan would not understand.

  “Lots of fathers try that route, as you know, and we pick up the pieces.” Sullivan clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re in the soup now, man. You’ve just got to learn how to swim.”

  Green’s door swung slowly open. They both looked up to see Sharon standing in his doorway, Tony balanced on one hip. The baby’s face split in a wide grin at the sight of him.

  “Soup?” Sharon repeated, calm and unreadable.

  Sullivan moved to the door. “That’s my cue, folks. I’m off.” He tickled Tony’s toes, mouthed the word “swim” at Green and slipped past them out the door.

  Sharon remained planted where she was. “I listened to your seven messages on the tape and I decided I’d better come talk to you personally. God knows when you’d come home.”

  He winced but said nothing. His seven messages had said it all. He was a screw-up, he was obsessed with his work, sometimes he couldn’t think straight, but he loved her, he loved Tony, he’d go to the moon for her if she’d give him another chance. Now it was her turn. She shifted Tony on her hip, and her composure wavered. She studied the floor.

  “I guess I haven’t been exactly blameless in all this, Mike. I’ve been bitchy and always tired and preoccupied with Tony. The old body’s all out of shape, and my breasts are still leaking milk. Not quite the girl you married.”

  “Stop it.” He jumped to his feet and moved toward her. “Darling, nothing happened.”

  She backed against the door, whipping her head back and forth. “Don’t give me that. Denials or confessions…I really don’t want to know.” Her voice quavered. “I know I can’t compete—”

  “No!” He gripped her by the arms. “You need to know. Nothing happened. Yes, I was attracted to her and yes, she came on to me. But I stopped it. She got my tie off and my pants undone, but I stopped it. Because I didn’t want to lose us.”

  For a long moment she simply stared at the floor, but finally her mouth twitched slightly at the corners. “She got your pants undone? How much?”

  He risked tracing his finger lightly across her hand. “If we weren’t in my office and you didn’t have Tony, I’d show you how much.”

  She sighed. “I’m just not sure it’s going to work, Mike.”

  “I know I’m not much good at keeping my promises, but—”

  “But you promise to change?”

  He bit his lip; she wasn’t smiling. She had heard all this before. “No, but—” he eased Tony out of her arms into his, “—I do want to try.”

  “That seventh message, when you promised me a new house…”

  With his free hand, he reached for the phone. “I’ll call Mary Sullivan right now.”

  She finally smiled her slow, wise-cracking smile. “You ought to be tempted more often, Green. I might get a swimming pool out of it next time.”

  This is a work of fiction and, although the Ottawa locales and the institutions such as the University of Ottawa and the Ottawa Police do exist, all the events and people are the invention of the author and any resemblance to actual events is strictly coincidental. The University of Ottawa does not have a self-contained neuroscience or neuropsychology department as constituted in this book.

  Barbara Fradkin was born in Montreal and educated at McGill University, the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa. Her work as a child psychologist provides plenty of insight and inspiration for her fiction.

  Barbara’s short fiction has been published in many short story magazine and anthologies. She has published six Inspector Green mysteries with RendezVous Crime, Do or Die (2000), Once Upon a Time (2002), Mist Walker (2003), Fifth Son (2004), Honour Among Men (2006) and Dream Chasers(2007). Fifth Son and Honour Among Men both won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, Canada’s top crime writing prize.

  Barbara lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

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