by Peggy Blair
“I admit I pushed her,” Otero said.
“I think maybe you pushed her twice,” said Ramirez. “Once against the mirror and once against the wall. That’s why your wedding picture fell down. And who could blame you? It’s not like you hit her with your fist. Our pathologist says it barely left a mark.”
“This is very good,” said Flores. “It diminishes the nature of the assault. It lets the suspect admit to it without feeling guilty. Notice how Ramirez says ‘it’ instead of ‘you,’ so he’s not accusatory.”
Otero brightened a little. “It was more like a slap.”
Flores turned to the two detectives. “Excellent! He’s established motive and opportunity.”
“But how did Otero get her to the killing ground?” said Espinoza.
“Inspector Ramirez isn’t done yet,” said Flores. He smiled. “Give him a few minutes.”
“So you honestly didn’t know that your wife was a jinetera before you had this terrible argument?” Ramirez asked. He chose the word argument instead of fight to minimize the extent of the violence. He lit a cigar, then reached in his pocket for another and offered it to Otero. “Sit down again, please, Señor Otero. Relax.”
“Of course not.” Juan Otero bristled, but he sat on the plastic chair again and accepted the cigar.
Ramirez leaned over and lit it for him. “How did you find out about the other men?”
Otero sighed and blinked back tears. “She brought home stockings.”
“Ah,” said Ramirez. “A gift from a client?”
Otero nodded. He drew on the cigar and coughed.
“That would drive any man insane,” said Ramirez. “You’ve lost your job; you have no money. It’s Lovers’ Day. You want to give your wife a gift and can’t afford to. And then she comes home with something like that. I suppose she waved them in your face.”
“It was my fault, she said, that she had to fuck strangers on our anniversary.”
“And before this, you had no idea?”
“None.”
Ramirez quickly changed the subject so the suspect would have no time to think. “This car your friend Rider Aguilera owns. Does he let you borrow it?”
“Yes, sometimes,” Otero said. “Why?”
Ramirez ignored the question. “We know LaNeva was in Santiago in January. Why did she go home?”
“To see her parents.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“That’s what she told me”
“According to our records, LaNeva was deported to Santiago after she received her third warning for prostitution,” said Ramirez. “But she didn’t stay there for long. Only a few days. I think you borrowed your friend Rider’s car and drove her back.”
The man began to shake. “I didn’t know where she was going, okay? She disappeared. Then she called me from Santiago and said she wanted to come home.”
“Called you how? You have no phone.”
“She . . .” Otero hesitated, trapped. “I . . . she had a cell phone.”
“Which she left with you because she couldn’t take it to Santiago. Having one is illegal. You’re not stupid, Señor. You know how rare ‘chocolates’ are, and how expensive. How do you think she paid for such a phone?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“Really? You and your wife really didn’t communicate very well, did you? Tell me, how did you pay for the gas to get all the way from Havana to Santiago and back?”
Otero’s face blanched.
“You’ve already told me you had no work. You didn’t even have enough money to live with your own family. I think your wife paid for the fuel, by selling herself in Santiago.”
“Pardon me?” said Otero. “Can you repeat that?” The cigar in his hand was shaking uncontrollably.
“I think you knew that your wife was a jinetera, Señor. You admit, it made you furious that she preferred to be with foreign men on Lovers’ Day. Is that why you choked her?”
“I didn’t choke her,” said Otero. “I swear to God.”
Invoking God was another way guilty men tried to emphasize their innocence. Ramirez slammed his hand on the table.
“Stop lying to me. You fought. You wanted her to stop talking about the men who gave her things you couldn’t afford. You put your hands around her throat to make her stop. I’m sure you didn’t mean to kill her; it was an accident. And then you used her cell phone to call Rider, to borrow his car. You told us she went missing on February 15, but she was already dead by then. She died on February 14, Señor. That’s the day you admit the two of you argued. The day you strangled her to death with your bare hands.”
“But I never did that,” Otero shouted. “I only hit her once, I swear. Maybe twice. Okay, I lied about when she went missing. I knew people might have heard us fighting the night she disappeared. I knew I would be blamed if something bad had happened to her, so I said she left for work the next day. She ran out of the building, crying, and I never saw her again.” He broke down and wept. “And now she’s dead. How do you think I feel, knowing that the last words I said to my wife were angry ones, that I called her a whore?”
“Ramirez has him now,” said Flores. “The lies, the denial, the admission he hit her more than once. That’s more than enough for the arrest.”
“He still maintains he didn’t kill her,” said Ramirez to Manuel Flores after Espinoza and Delgado left to take Juan Otero down to Booking. “And he denies borrowing his friend’s car that night. We’ll track this Aguilera down, but what do you think?”
“Clearly, he felt cuckolded. It was an explosive situation. I’m still working on my profile, but I can always change it.”
“You would rewrite a profile to fit the criminal?”
Flores smiled. “If that’s what you need, Ramirez. We want to get a vicious killer off the streets, don’t we?”
“Only if we can be sure that’s what we’ve done.”
“It’s more than possible. Hold him for a few days while you fill in the gaps. It was smart of you not to ask him questions about Prima Verrier’s death. Best not to ask a question unless you know the answer.”
“I don’t know,” said Ramirez, shaking his head. “I can only keep him in custody for three days. Then I have to turn the case file over to the Attorney General’s office to proceed with the indictment.”
“All you need to prove is that he’s likely to have committed this murder on the balance of probabilities. You’re close to that now with the circumstantial evidence. Once he’s indicted, you’ll have a year or more to tighten up the charges. It will take that long to get him before a juridical panel. That’s if he survives prison, of course.” Flores patted him on the shoulder and smiled. “Good work, Ramirez. I’m proud of you. Well done.”
47
Before he arrested his old friend for murder, Charlie Pike needed to know what was in those medical records. Breaking into the health clinic was a whole lot easier than he expected. The door didn’t even have a deadbolt, just a lock.
Pike pushed his ID card between the door and the jam, and slid it up and down. The door popped open right away. No alarm beeped, nothing went off. That was good; it gave him more time. His heart was pounding the way it had when he was fourteen. But this time, he was on the side of the law. Heck, he was the law.
If Pete Bissonnette or one of the OPP saw him inside, he’d say he was driving by, found the door open, and was checking in case there was a break and enter in progress. If they asked why he hadn’t called for backup, that was easy. His cell phone didn’t work, and once he was inside the building, it was too late to worry about backup anyway. He turned on the lights. There was no need to work in the dark, not with his cover story.
Pike wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. He searched through the reception desk until he found a set of keys.
He decided
to start in the morgue. He walked downstairs and unlocked the door.
The woman’s body was still in a metal drawer in the refrigeration unit. He pulled it out, winced at the ragged scar running down her chest, the large staples. She was purple, though, not blue. What’s black and white and red all over? he thought. Angry nuns.
He closed the refrigerator drawer, locked the morgue door, and backed out instinctively, the way Sheldon had taught him, to cover his tracks.
He let himself into the visiting doctor’s office, the one Maylene Kesler had been assigned before she died. The one Adam Neville was using. Maybe the filing cabinet still held her files.
Pike took a paper clip from a container on the desk and jiggled it in the filing cabinet lock until it popped open. A series of files hung in coloured folders. He riffled through them until he found what he was looking for.
Maylene Kesler’s report on the Manomin Bay First Nation was in a thick green folder. From the looks of it, she’d co-authored a couple of draft articles on mercury contamination and the Northern Ojibway too. The file contained an article from a medical journal published on Minamata disease and its effects. He read through it quickly, taking note of the symptoms.
Sensory disturbance and constriction are typical among patients: dysarthria, tremors, walking problems, hearing, and coordination disturbances. Symptoms can range from mild to serious. Some mild cases of coordination disturbance are difficult to identify.
There was another medical study on the purported link between autism and thimerosal, the mercury used in vaccination. A newspaper story was folded between its pages. One paragraph had been underlined:
Between 1962 and 1970, natives in several northern Ontario communities discovered their main food source had record-high levels of mercury from a paper mill up the river. The finding resulted in the mill being closed down along with northern fishing lodges. While physicians debate the extent of their health, with their food supply destroyed as well as their local economy, natives have endured decades of alcoholism, poverty, and abuse.
Got that right, Pike thought. He went back to the filing cabinet and searched through its contents until he found Maylene Kesler’s test results. They were lined up neatly in a red folder. To preserve confidentiality, there were no names, only number-letter combinations. Another folder held a stack of consent forms.
He shuffled through the reports. Forty-two band members had submitted to blood tests, including all of Bill Wabigoon’s family. Even Molly Oshig and her son, Pauley, participated. Another twenty non-Aboriginal people from White Harbour and Manomin Bay provided blood.
He scanned through the individual results. It was scientific mumbo-jumbo, until he found an entry that caught his eye:
Tests on P-1 and P-A3 indicate consanguineous relationship with resulting autosomal recessive disorder in PO. Mean excess mortality of 4.5% for first cousins likely to be exceeded. Consult with departmental lawyer regarding Section 155 of the Criminal Code and obligation of disclosure. Also suggest complete evaluation of P-A3 by appropriate professionals. Subject manifests marked impairment in social interaction, qualitative impairment in communication, preoccupation with abnormal and restricted pattern of interest (birds), hand- and finger-flapping. Possible trigger mercury?
Pike tried to remember what was in that section of the Criminal Code. Sexual offences. Touching. Sex with minors. But he’d left his pocket Code on his desk back in Ottawa.
He looked around for a medical dictionary and found one on a shelf. He looked up recessive: “Genetics. Of or pertaining to a recessive.” Great, he thought. A dictionary meaning that relied on itself.
He thumbed through the pages until he found autosomal: “a chromosome that is not a sex chromosome.” Then, consanguineous: “relationship by blood or common ancestor.” And dysarthria: “trouble speaking, difficulty forming words.”
He could spend an hour or more trying to decipher what all that meant, and it was getting pretty late. He slid the contents of the reports under the photocopier in the corner and pushed Copy. The room lit up with a bright blue light like Pauley Oshig’s computer screen.
Pike sat down behind the desk. Adam Neville’s laptop was on, the screen saver still displaying the photograph of Neville and his wife on the mountain.
Pike used the paper clip he’d used to open the filing cabinet to jimmy the desk drawer. Inside, he found a pack of cigarettes—Lucky Strike. One was missing. Well, that explained the cigarette butt at the scene, he thought. It was probably the victim’s.
There was a black medical bag in the corner. He stood up and walked over to it. He opened it up and rummaged through the contents of what appeared to be a standard pathology kit.
It was Neville’s, he realized, not Maylene Kesler’s. It included latex gloves, tweezers, a plastic bottle of Luminol, a bottle of peroxide, and a disposable container of ninhydrin. There was a flashlight. He turned it on and realized it had an ultraviolet light bulb; it was used for picking up bloodstains after a surface was sprayed with Luminol. He looked at the plastic bottle of Luminol and was surprised to see it was almost empty.
The bottle of ninhydrin had been opened as well. He walked back to the desk and examined the screensaver on the laptop more carefully.
Then he put everything back where it belonged and locked the filing cabinet. He slipped the pack of Lucky Strikes into a plastic exhibit bag, initialled and dated it. He put it in his jacket pocket, then closed the desk drawer. He couldn’t lock it up again, but hoped no one would notice.
He walked upstairs and turned off the lights. There was no way to secure the front door either, but maybe the nurse practitioner would think she’d forgotten to do it on her way out. She’d been upset; she’d just found out that Maylene Kesler had been murdered. That’s what she’d tell herself when she showed up in the morning and found everything open but nothing missing. At least, nothing obvious.
The old man had told him, Pike thought, as he drove slowly to the Tops Motel, finally putting the pieces together. Nanabozho was hiding in the water.
When Charlie Pike got back to his motel room, there was a pink message slip left by reception under the door. Miles O’Malley had called. Pike was to phone him at home.
It was well after midnight. Pike thought about calling the police chief the next day. But then, it was Pike’s turn to wake O’Malley up—after all, fair was fair.
As it turned out, O’Malley was still awake. Pike told him about Sheldon Waubasking and the fingerprints on the dashboard of the victim’s car, as well as what he’d found at the health clinic and what he thought all of it meant.
“Ah, shit, Charlie. I can’t believe it. You really think he’s responsible for this? Did he do it himself or was he covering up for someone else?”
Pike sighed. “Covering up, I think. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. I’ll see what I find out tomorrow when I question him.”
“You’re not going to arrest him tonight?”
“It’s late. There’s no rush. He doesn’t even know he’s a suspect. He’s not going anywhere. I don’t want to bust in on him; I don’t have a weapon. It can wait until morning. I should have the OPP on hand for backup anyway.”
“If you think so. But for God’s sake, be careful. He could be armed. By the way, I almost forgot. I’ve got some news for you too. That was the reason I called you in the first place. The OPP found one of the missing women on that list of yours today. Molly Oshig.”
Pike’s heart dropped. “She’s dead?”
“No. She’s working in Kenora as a waitress, at a diner on Lake-view. But she’s changed her name to Pauline Johnson. That’s good news, isn’t it? That she’s alive?”
“I hope so,” said Pike. “I’ll go see her first thing in the morning, make sure she’s all right. Before I let you go, Chief, have you got a copy of your Criminal Code handy? I need to know what’s in section 155.”
>
“Give me a minute, lad.”
A minute later, O’Malley read out the section. Pike nodded slowly, fitting that piece of information with the rest.
“Keep me posted, Charlie. I’m going to get hold of Pete Bissonnette for you now and ask for OPP assistance. He won’t be happy when I tell him about the arrest. It complicates things, believe me.”
“He’ll probably swear at you.” Pike smiled. “Don’t take it personally. Tell him to meet me at the health clinic at ten a.m. I’ll set things up there.”
The last thing Pike did before his head hit the pillow was call the night clerk at the motel reception desk and ask to be put through to Adam Neville.
“Sorry if I woke you up, Adam.”
“It’s late, Charlie. It’s after midnight.” The medical examiner sounded annoyed.
“You still plan on leaving tomorrow?”
“Noon flight to Winnipeg, yes. I think my work here is done.”
“I need to go over some evidence with you before you leave. I’ll have to explain all of this to Chief Wabigoon as soon as I make the arrest. Can you free up some time for me before you head out?”
“Of course,” said Neville, yawning. “Where do you want to meet?”
“At the health clinic. I’ll try to be there for nine thirty. I may be a little late—I’ve got to meet someone in Kenora first.”
Pike hung up. He tried to remember what his mishomis had taught him about the best way to set a trap.
48
Although it was very late when he got home, Inspector Ramirez called his in-laws’ number anyway. His adrenaline had subsided, leaving him empty with fatigue.
“It’s after midnight, Ricardo,” said Francesca. “The children are in bed.”
She sounded irritated and it deflated him. He wanted to talk over his uncertainties but decided it was best not to discuss his investigation and risk annoying her even more. “I’m sorry, cariño,” he said. “The day got away from me. How are the little ones?”