Dan was aware of the competitiveness police officers felt around him. He wasn’t a cop, yet he often found himself working in their presumed territory.
“Might I ask if this is the person I’m searching for then?”
The blonde cop smirked in a humourless way. “Ask all you want, but it’s none of your business, sir.”
Dan felt his anger igniting. There was more than one way to say “fuck you” to an arrogant prick who took his authority too seriously. As far as Dan was concerned, cops were just one more form of civil servant. They could stand to be a lot more civil to the taxpayers who hired them.
He turned to the coroner and held out his hand.
“Dan Sharp.”
“Tim Johnson.”
“Good to meet you, Tim. Did you notice a gold-capped incisor?”
“Yes, I did.”
The attendant smiled and turned up the dead man’s lip with a gloved hand. There for all the world to see was the gold cap. Dan got the feeling that Tim was relieved to be talking to someone who didn’t look down on him. He also seemed more than happy to upstage this little martinet.
Howard stood looking down at the body with its missing ear and badly beaten face.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Who did this? It’ll take more than a little lipstick and mascara to make this one presentable.”
The younger officer eyed him then turned back to his partner. “Fucking queers,” he muttered under his breath.
“Yeah, we’re everywhere,” Dan said, scowling.
The cop looked him over, taking note of his boxer’s physique. “You’re kidding me,” he said, with a look of surprise. “You one of them too?”
“Spare me your hang-ups,” Dan said.
The cop shook his head in disgust then turned to his partner. He nodded at the corpse. “First this perv and now queers. I think we’re done here.”
Dan’s ears twigged at the word: perv. What did they know about Hillary that he didn’t?
Once the officers left, the coroner nodded ruefully. “Not the most pleasant of chaps. They’re not all like that, mind, but some of the younger ones need to be taken down a peg or two.”
“You’re welcome to try,” Dan said. “I won’t tackle them. They get away with far too much now, from what I hear.”
Tim smiled. “And by the way, they mentioned the name, so yes, I’m happy to confirm that this is your man. Or perhaps I should say I’m sorry to confirm this is your man, depending on your outlook.”
He pointed to the form on his clipboard where the name Darryl Hillary was printed next to the line identifying the deceased. They all looked down at the body, as though it might contradict them.
“Cause of death was strangling,” said the coroner, pointing out purple ligature marks around the neck that Dan hadn’t seen in the darkened slaughterhouse interior.
“So someone strong then,” Dan noted.
“I’d say so. Or possibly more than one person. He was killed after being beaten. He was tormented first, quite methodically. I can assure you that considerable pain was inflicted before he died.” He pointed to the face. “He suffered a broken nose and a bashed-in left cheekbone, both probably the result of being hit with a metal pipe or bar of some sort. It would have to have been exceptionally painful. The missing ear may have been sliced off while he was alive.” He looked at Dan. “It’s hard to say. If it was, then he died soon after. Strangling was the coup de grâce. I’d say this man knew he was going to die. And he probably welcomed it.”
“So cruelty was part of the killer’s intention,” Dan said.
“Undoubtedly. But as to its purpose, I can’t say. Someone may have been trying to extract information or maybe they just wanted him to suffer.”
“Was the ear retrieved?”
“I gather it wasn’t found on the premises, so whoever killed him may be a souvenir collector.”
“That’s a gruesome thought,” Dan said.
The coroner nodded. “Howard was correct in saying he’s going to have a hard time making Mr. Hillary presentable for the family.” He looked over at Howard. “But Howard is one of the best. I have absolute faith in his work.”
The coroner pulled the cover over Darryl Hillary’s chest and face, reducing him to a lump beneath a sheet.
Dan shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your time and your candour.”
“You’re welcome.”
Howard followed Dan out into the hallway. “Catch a coffee with me?” he asked. “I promise not to throw it at you.”
Dan smiled. “Why not?”
Four
Romeo and Juliet in Love
Darlene Hillary’s address lay nestled in Dan’s cellphone beneath her home number. Though he dreaded it, Dan knew he had to give her the news as soon as possible. The most humane as well as the most difficult way to convey news of a loved one’s death was to tell the relatives in person. The people who hired him to find their family members pinned a certain amount of hope on him. Usually, that hope was that he would find them alive and well, somehow and somewhere. Of course, the alternative was always an ever-present if unspoken possibility. No one realized this more than Dan. When he had bad news to deliver, most of the clients still expressed gratitude for the knowledge that would allow them to grieve and, when possible, get on with their lives. Some feared or hated him for the pain he brought. A few, however irrational it was, blamed him. No matter how Dan delivered the news, no matter under what circumstances, he felt like a monster.
He turned right onto the Gardiner Expressway and joined a queue of cars heading west out of the city. Twenty minutes later he reached Etobicoke, one of Toronto’s “postal villages.” This was where Darlene Hillary had lived with her brother. Dan nosed onto Daisy Avenue, a short street north of Lakeshore Boulevard. In this neighbourhood, the houses were minuscule, almost of dollhouse proportions. He found the number and pulled up at the curb. In the front yard, an apple tree offered up small red globes for viewing. Children on bikes screamed at one another and threw balls in a replica of an idyllic existence. The improbable dream that was the promise of suburbia.
The woman who came to the door was not much larger than a doll herself, but one that had aged badly. Raggedy Anne on the downlow. The planes of her face were hard, the skin dry, suggesting illness or possibly that she’d been living under great strain for some time. The eyes glinted, but not with joy. There was no mirth there, no trust. People who lived with grief or fear long enough ended up wearing it on their faces, Dan knew. A permanently down-turned mouth was one of the signs of a pessimistic personality. Darlene Hillary looked like someone who had long since accepted that life was going to be hard and there was no use bringing it up to management, because Heaven was deaf to all complaints. A bartender would have proved a more sympathetic listener to someone like her.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said before he could introduce himself. “The police were here ten minutes ago.”
Dan took the news in stride, remembering the dismissive Mr. and Mrs. Spratt. He felt both resentful and grateful they’d beat him to it.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, offering the obligatory catchall that cut through the awkwardness of emotion. “I wish I could have done more.”
She nodded her acceptance of his admission that he’d been unable to find her brother in time, but letting him know there was no blame.
“If only he hadn’t run. You might’ve been able to protect him.”
Dan doubted that. “In my experience, people run when they believe the threats against them are real. Did your brother have any enemies?”
“Not that I knew of.” A rueful shrug. “But then, how much do we really know about other people, even the ones we live with?”
A philosophical turn of mind then, Dan noted. Apparently she didn’t expect an answer.
Normally, he would have left it there. He’d offer his condolences and make an exit. But something felt incomplete.
“Do you mind if
I ask a few questions about your brother?”
He wasn’t entirely sure why he needed to ask her anything. Unfinished business, perhaps. That and a feeling of wanting to do more for a man who’d died an undeservedly cruel and monstrous death.
Darlene Hillary ushered him into a tiny matchbox of a living room filled with unexceptional furniture. It was, Dan thought, the sort of furniture people bought when they had no idea what they wanted other than to have something to sit on or to invite guests in for a drink and offer them a footstool and a surface to put their glasses on. Dan glanced over a shelf crammed with knick-knacks and framed portraits. He caught a laughing face with a ready smile, limbs over- and under-twined in a row of teenage boys. This was a much younger Darryl Hillary. Not long out of high school, Dan imagined. Exuberant, even hopeful, as he and his pals faced the future and all it might bring. He hadn’t always been friendless, then.
Darlene brought him his third cup of coffee that morning. He poured cream, stirred it into turbulent clouds and sat back in a worn brown armchair. It was comfortable, at least.
“Please, go ahead and ask me anything you like,” Darlene said, her gaze fixed on his face.
“I asked earlier if your brother owed someone a substantial sum of money,” Dan said, thinking of Darryl’s drug habit. He recalled the cop’s comment that Darryl Hillary’s fingerprints had been on file.
It would have been for some past offence. “I was wondering if anything came to mind since then.”
“No. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Apart from occasional marijuana usage, did he ever indulge in drugs of the harder sort?”
She shook her head. “If he did, he didn’t tell me. I’d find it hard to believe, in any case. He wasn’t really an extremist in that way.”
Dan nodded. What he found hard to believe was that her brother had received death threats because he smoked marijuana. Thousands of ordinary Canadians had been busted for possession of cannabis and worse. Dan doubted any of them had been threatened with death because of it. In any case, the crime was long overdue for a scrubbing off the books, and probably would have been but for the righteous heave-ho of so-called moralists to the south, whose policies overarched and affected Canada’s own far more than most Canadians liked to acknowledge. But other than his predilection for an adolescent indulgence, Darryl Hillary seemed to have had little contact with the outside world.
Dan recalled Darlene’s voice on the phone the first time they spoke. She’d sounded frantic. Instinct told him there had to be something else.
“The threatening calls you mentioned — did you overhear any of them? Do you have any idea what your brother was being threatened over? What he might have been running from?”
She looked resigned. “I didn’t overhear anything directly. He said it was about his past. About … about the time he’d spent in prison.”
Dan’s eyebrows shot up. She’d lied to him. This was the first he’d heard anything about prison. Too late, he thought of the ardent courier and the file he’d left unread on the shelf in the hallway.
“For marijuana possession?”
“No.” It was a whisper.
Dan waited.
She looked up. A sigh escaped her. “The charge was ‘corruption of a minor.’”
Bells were clanging as Dan flashed back to one of the cop’s referring to Darryl as a “perv.”
“Your brother was convicted of having sex with an underage partner?”
She nodded. “That was a long time ago.”
Dan looked over at the younger Darryl’s photo-
graph again. His ready smile now seemed to be a warning against over-optimism about everything life held in store for you.
“Please don’t judge us,” Darlene said.
“I won’t. Can you tell me about it?”
Her fingers played with the nubbly fabric on the arm of the chair while she filled in the gaps in her story. She and Darryl were ten years apart in age, so she often felt more like a mother than an older sister. They’d grown up together in Northern Ontario. A poor existence, but not an unbearable one, she told him, like so much stage dressing for the story to come. The parents had been religious but the kids maintained their sanity despite their father’s constant preaching and his dire warnings of an impending apocalypse that he seemed to welcome and felt his children should as well. It hadn’t kept his son away from temptation, however. After his conviction, Darryl spent two years in prison. Following his release, he and Darlene moved to Toronto, hoping he’d be more anonymous in a larger urban centre. He’d stayed within the bounds of his parole and hadn’t strayed from the court order forbidding contact with his former victim. The girl, fourteen at the time, would now be twenty-five. Darryl had been thirty when he died.
Sometime over the last year, Darlene said, her brother had been targeted by hate mail and death threats. When pressed, he’d admitted that it was in connection with “the old business.”
“He hid it from me for some time,” Darlene said. “But eventually he had to tell me. I’m just not sure how long it was going on.”
“How did you find out about it?” Dan asked.
“Darryl’s behaviour changed drastically. He was afraid of going outside. He even stopped sitting out back in the garden. Until the letters and calls came, he spent most of his time out there, even in the winter. He loved the garden. It was his place of refuge. Then suddenly he just stopped. He used to peer through the curtains when he had to go out for anything. I could tell something was up.”
“And he believed the threats were real?”
She nodded. “How did these people even find him?” she asked, wiping away a stray tear. “The property was in my name. The address shouldn’t have been listed in connection with him.”
“They have their ways,” Dan said. “Your brother would likely have been listed on the Sex Offenders Registry.”
Darlene shook her head at the suggestion. “He shouldn’t have been on it any more.”
Under the new rules, Darryl’s lawyers had applied to have his name and record removed, citing his case as an unlikely repeat offender. As far as anyone knew he had been taken off the list, but sometime over the last year her brother had been targeted by hate mail and death threats referring to his conviction.
“You said the girl was fourteen at the time?”
She nodded.
“Making your brother nineteen.”
Brown eyes turned to him. “Not a very mature nineteen, not that it makes much difference.” She looked away. “I’m not making excuses for him.”
Dan nodded. “Their ages weren’t that far apart. Am I right in thinking she was Darryl’s girlfriend?”
Darlene nodded. “They were quite serious about each other. It wasn’t just a casual thing for them. He once told me they planned to be married when she turned sixteen.” She looked off wistfully. “You never saw two
people so in love. He was devoted to her and she to him.”
“The problem is they were more than four years apart in age,” Dan said. “So what is called a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ clause would not have helped out here. Even if they declared themselves in a serious relationship, he would still be perceived by the court as an older aggressor.”
She shrugged. “That’s more or less what happened. Just before his trial, another young girl was raped and murdered by her older boyfriend. It was in all the papers. It didn’t help Darryl one bit either.”
“No, I’m sure it didn’t.” Dan thought for a moment. “If you don’t mind, can you tell me how your brother ended up being charged?”
A spasm of anger crossed Darlene’s face. “Our father turned him in. He caught them together one afternoon.”
Leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken lives, Dan thought. He put down his cup and waited a moment. “Do you want me to come with you to the morgue?”
She shook her head. Finally, the tears started.
“Thank you, but no. They said I couldn’t see him yet. I
t won’t be for another day at least.”
Dan thought of Darryl’s badly beaten face, the severed ear. He had a flash of the body hanging overhead, like a hideous goblin in a child’s horror story. He thought of the blood dripping onto his face as he lay on the floor after being swiped at with the pipe. It was common for the police to prevent the next of kin from seeing a badly damaged corpse. He wondered how much to tell her.
“They’re probably trying to make sure he looks presentable before you see him. You don’t want your last image of him to upset you.”
She was watching him closely. “He must have been badly beaten.”
Dan reached out a hand and put it on her shoulder. “I’m very sorry, Darlene.”
She nodded, blubbering and unable to speak for almost a minute. Then the fury died out and she looked up again.
“I wish I’d told you about his past earlier,” she said. “He never wanted anyone to know. He made me promise never to tell anyone.”
Dan shook his head. “Believe me, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I put out a number of calls, but my sources found where your brother was staying too late. I don’t see how we could have found him any earlier, even if we’d known more about him. He was just too well hidden.”
She nodded in recognition of his generosity in saying this. Even if she believed him, it wouldn’t help her live with herself.
“Not well enough, I guess.”
Dan hesitated, but he needed to ask. “Is it possible your brother might have had contact with his former girlfriend since his release from prison?”
Her eyes shifted. For a moment he saw her as a younger woman, watching her brother’s life fall apart in a court of law for something she’d known but done nothing about.
“If he did, he didn’t tell me about it. I doubt Darryl even knew where to find her. The girl’s father moved the family away right after the trial.”
Dan looked at this short, thin woman with the worn face. In another few years, he might pass her on the street and not recognize her. She was so unexceptional looking that he likely wouldn’t take a second glance. She’d disappear into the crowd and lose herself forever. Just one more lost soul with a burden too huge to bear.
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