Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  Mist

  Walker

  An Inspector Green Mystery

  Barbara Fradkin

  Books by Barbara Fradkin:

  The Inspector Green Series

  Do or Die (2000)

  Once Upon a Time (2002)

  Fifth Son (2004)

  Honour Among Men (2006)

  Dream Chasers (2007)

  This Thing of Darkness (Fall 2009)

  Short Stories in the following anthologies:

  The Ladies Killing Circle (1995)

  Cottage Country Killers (1997)

  Menopause is Murder (1999)

  Fit to Die (2001)

  Iced (2001)

  Hard-Boiled Love (2002)

  Bone Dance (2003)

  When Boomers Go Bad (2006)

  Dead in the Water (2006)

  Going Out With a Bang (2008)

  Acknowledgements

  Mist Walker deals with a complex, emotionally charged theme which deserves an informed and respectful voice. A number of experts willingly and graciously answered my call for help during the writing of this book. My thanks to Sergeant James Davies of the Child Abuse and Sexual Assault Unit of the Ottawa Police, Staff Sergeant Don Sweet, formerly of the Forensic Identification Unit, Dr. Brenda Saxe of the Centre for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse and Childhood Trauma, Margaret Lederman of the Forensic Psychiatry Unit of the Royal Ottawa Hospital, and especially Constable Mark Cartwright of the Ottawa Police for his ongoing advice and expertise in police matters.

  I am also indebted to my writing colleagues, particularly Mary Jane Maffini, Robin Harlick, Madona Skaff, Jane Tun and Tom Curran, for their insightful support, and to my editor, Allister Thompson and my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, for their continuing belief in my work.

  Mist Walker is a work of fiction, and although the Ottawa Police Service and many of the Ottawa locales do exist, all the events and people, as well as the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, are the invention of the author. Any resemblance to actual circumstances is purely coincidental.

  “...and many times beating with her hands on the earth abundant she called on Hades and on honoured Persephone... And Erinys, the mist walker, of the heart without pity, heard her out of the dark places.”

  -The Iliad of Homer Book IX, 569-572

  One

  To Janice’s surprise, the door was unlocked. Matthew Fraser, a man with five locks and a ten minute ritual for securing them, had left his apartment unlocked. She twisted the knob, pushed gingerly, and let the door drift open before her. Even before she stepped inside, the smell knocked her back two feet. Like mildewed carpet and week-old fish baking together in the heat. How could the man stand it!

  A narrow, dimly lit hall stretched ahead of her, its brown carpet worn bare with age.

  “Matt?” She tossed the word cautiously into the gloom. No response. She sifted the silence. Nothing. Not the whir of air conditioning, not the whisper of breathing, not even the distant hum of traffic from Merivale Road. With shallow breaths, she edged down the hall into the main room. At the entranceway, she froze, trying to make sense of the sight before her.

  Lining the walls and filling every spare cranny were floor to ceiling shelves crammed with books, binders and newspapers curling with age. More stacks sat on the coffee table and the floor as if waiting for space. A vinyl couch and a computer were the only other occupants of the room. Dust danced in the slivers of sunlight that seeped past the blinds on the windows.

  “Matt?” she ventured again, peering around a bookshelf into another hall. More bookshelves. More newspapers. An old-fashioned telephone table held a heavy black phone with its receiver off the hook. No wonder I couldn’t get through, she thought as she hung it back up.

  She’d been trying to call Matt for six days, ever since he’d failed to show up for their daily walk. He had seemed unusually skittish at last week’s therapy group, and his old paranoia had been creeping back in. He’d been talking about conspiracies and about the futility of the little guy against the system. Just like bullies in the playground, he’d said, they own all the balls in the game.

  He never stopped trying, that much was clear. Whatever obsessed him was right here in this room, labelled by month and year going back ten years. There was an entire bookshelf devoted to cross-examination and the testimony of minors, and another two bookshelves of Ottawa Citizens and Suns dating back a decade. He had bookcases on psychology ranging all the way from Sigmund Freud through cognitive psychology to recent texts on post-traumatic stress disorder. Other books lay splayed open on the coffee table and stacked on the floor.

  Janice felt the hairs rise on her arms as she gazed at the clutter, which had a flavour of fanaticism. She liked Matt and thought him a lonely, wounded man who was struggling to put his life together. It had taken him weeks to say a word in the therapy group, more weeks to accept her invitation to coffee, and months to confide to her anything of his ordeal. At the beginning, she’d simply thought him shy and slow to trust anyone but his cherished Modo, a Lab-Rottweiler mix that he’d adopted from the Humane Society. Modo had been a reject like himself, found at four months old tied to the railway track on the outskirts of the city. She’d been ungainly and mismatched, all feet and monstrous head, but she’d suited his mood. He’d taken her in when he was at his lowest ebb, shut away from the world, fearing the gossip and the disgust.

  Modo! Janice realized belatedly that the dog had not greeted her at the door. Modo had been well trained to scare off intruders and should have set up a thunderous barking the second Janice started fiddling with the door.

  Matt must have taken his dog with him, Janice decided, which was hardly unusual, since the dog spent most of her time glued to his side. But where would he have gone, and what was he up to? He was agoraphobic; the mere glimpse of crowds and bustling streets sent him scrambling back to the safety of his apartment. On top of that, he was so paranoid that he never even raised the blinds on his windows and had bought himself the biggest, ugliest guard dog he could find. Yet today, he had left his front door unlocked.

  Despite her trepidation, Janice forced herself down the hall to the kitchen, where the smell was even stronger. The room was neat, but flies buzzed around a plate of crusted food on the counter. Modo’s food and water bowls sat empty on the floor by the fridge, and the Toronto Star was spread open on the tiny table. Matt said he read at least four papers a day. She glanced at the date. June 6, six days ago.

  Janice frowned in puzzlement. Matt clearly hadn’t been here for several days, but he appeared to have left abruptly. She felt a twinge of hurt along with her uneasiness, for he had not called her. True, he owed her nothing, because nothing had really happened between them. Just a few walks with the dog in the park, an amicable few hours over lattes at Starbucks, some friendly conversations and the first tentative sharing of private thoughts. But men didn’t come into her life all that often—who was she kidding, one hadn’t ventured near it in over fifteen years—so she’d allowed herself a faint hope.

  But now he was gone, without bothering to pick up the phone.

  Which was off the hook, she remembered with that odd chill again. Resisting the urge to clean up the dinner and throw out whatever garbage was creating the smell, she ventured instead towards a closed door at the end of the hall, which she assumed was the bedroom. He’d never invited her into his apartment, let alone his bedroom, and now she felt almost brazen. The door seemed locked when she first pushed against it, but then it gave a few inches, reluctantly, as if a huge weight was pinned against it. A fresh odour of feces wafted through the crack, and alarm galvanized her. Straining, she shoved the door back enough to squeeze through and stumbled over a huge limp object on the floor. She gasped at the sight.

  Modo lay on her sid
e against the door. At first glance, Janice thought she was dead, until she saw her eye move to meet Janice’s.

  “Modo!” Janice dropped to her knees at the dog’s side. Modo mustered a cocked eyebrow and a faint thump of her tail. The heat in the room was sweltering and the air rancid. Janice glanced around quickly and saw soiled patches in the rug, but no sign of food or water.

  “My God, you poor baby!” Janice hurried into the kitchen to fetch a bowl of water, but Modo was too weak to stand or drink. Janice began spooning water into the dog’s mouth. The dog flicked her tongue feebly, but Janice knew it was not enough. She had to get Modo out of the stifling room and into a vet’s care immediately, but the dog weighed at least a hundred pounds. It was a job which required a strong man. Much as she hated to admit it, her neighbour was the only one who came to mind. That was the trouble with years of rarely meeting another living soul.

  As she grabbed a phone book to look up his number, she suppressed a tremor of fear. Something was very wrong. No matter how obsessed and paranoid Matt had become, no matter how distorted his ideas, he would never have left Modo behind to die.

  * * *

  As he rounded the block to the station, Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green glanced at his watch in dismay. Almost six o’clock. Up ahead, southbound Elgin Street was still blocked solid with the last of the commuters exiting the downtown core. Police headquarters loomed on his right, a concrete bunker built in what Green had heard aptly described as the Brutalist style. Short on aesthetics, but no doubt designed so that a Scud missile could barely make a dent. The bunker was incongruously plunked amid the red brick Victorian townhouses of Centretown, a stone’s throw from the yuppie pubs of Elgin Street and the flowerbeds and recreational paths of the Rideau Canal. Even more incongruous was its spectacular view of the Museum of Nature, which sprawled like a Scottish baronial castle in the middle of a grassy square. Only a moat was lacking, although the constant traffic swirling around it up Metcalfe Street did a passable imitation.

  The view, however, was only enjoyed by the lucky few whose offices lined the north side of the building. Offices on the south side, if they’d had windows, would have looked over eight lanes of elevated expressway, complete with exhaust, noise and a constant stream of cars heading across the city. The theory was that police units responding to a call could reach even the farthest outskirts of the city in less than half an hour.

  Except at six o’clock, Green grumbled as he saw the tide of cars inching westward in the stifling afternoon sun. The damn meeting with the RCMP had shot the entire afternoon, and while he was wasting his time learning about the latest policy initiative, a dozen fresh cases had probably landed on the various crime desks under his command. It was proving a busy summer for criminals in the nation’s capital, for hot weather brought on the usual spate of domestics to add to the standard fare of drug-related assaults and armed robberies. Green needed to ensure that no new crises or screw-ups had surfaced while he was learning to play nice.

  Yet he’d promised Sharon he wouldn’t be home too late. She had just started a long stint of day shifts at the hospital, their son was getting yet another molar, and the air conditioning in their new home had succumbed to the heat for the third time this month. As flexible and forgiving as she was, today was not a day to put those qualities to the test.

  Five minutes, he promised her silently as he pulled into the circular drive of the station, flicked on his hazard lights and ducked through the glass doors into police headquarters. As his eyes adjusted to the cavernous gloom of the foyer, he made out the tall, angular figure of a woman at the reception desk at the side of the room. Encased head to toe in a shapeless brown shift, she was pressed to the window, punctuating her tirade with short jabs of her finger.

  Green glanced through the reception glass and groaned when he saw the florid face and triple jowls of Constable Dan Blake. Blake had thirty years on the force, during which he’d never advanced beyond beat cop, due to a lack of even the minimal requirement of intelligence, fitness and sobriety. He was an anachronism in modern policing, who regarded the hijacking of police work by youth, education, women and minorities with undisguised contempt. Green, as a universityeducated Jew and, at forty-one, still young for an inspector, was not on his list of favourites.

  The feeling was mutual, however, and Green gave a curt nod as he headed past on his way toward the elevator. A sudden smirk creased Blake’s jowls, and he flicked a pudgy finger in Green’s direction. The woman swung around instantly.

  “Excuse me!” she cried, leaping into Green’s path. “I want to report a missing person, but no one will take me seriously!”

  Green stopped and shot Blake an angry glare just in time to see the man suck his smirk back in and hustle out of the cubicle. “Sorry, Inspector Green,” he said, without the faintest hint of scorn. “Miss Tanner is concerned about a friend. Ma’am, if you’ll come back here—”

  The woman didn’t budge. “Inspector? Finally, someone near the top!”

  She was flushed and breathless, her eyes fixed on Green with desperate hope. With his five minutes ticking away, he seized on the nearest platitude. “Have you filed a missing persons report with—”

  “Of course I have,” she retorted. “It went into a computer database somewhere, and I’m sure that’s the end of it. They said I’m just a friend, so how can I even be sure he’s missing.”

  “Well,” Green equivocated, “is his family concerned? Has any one else reported him missing?”

  “That doesn’t matter! I know he’s missing, and not by his own choice. Something bad has happened to him.”

  Green caught Blake’s quick rolling of the eyes and felt a spike of anger. “Constable Blake, would you doublecheck that the officer who took Ms. Tanner’s report is aware of all her concerns?”

  Before Blake could react, she clamped her bony hand on Green’s arm. Her nails, he noted, were chewed to the quick. “But you’re an inspector. His boss, right?”

  “Inspector Green handles major criminal investigations,” Blake added, ever helpful.

  “I see,” she retorted, snatching her hand back. “This isn’t big enough for you, is that it? This is a major crime, I’m telling you. Something has happened to Matt. He didn’t just leave.”

  “I understand your concern,” Green replied, “and Constable Blake is going to follow up. But unless there’s evidence of a crime—”

  “What a ridiculous catch-22! How can there be evidence of a crime if you refuse to investigate?”

  “The officer on the case—”

  “—is a thick-headed twit!” She turned an unhealthy mottled pink, and her eyes sparked.

  “Inspector Green is certainly no thick-headed twit, Miss Tanner,” Blake interjected with a barely stifled grin. “He’s one of the sharpest knives in the drawer.”

  Green’s combination of brains, imagination and pure pigheadedness had earned him a fair reputation on the force, but coming from Blake, it was hardly a compliment. Green was just formulating an appropriate retort when Ms. Tanner renewed her grip on his arm.

  “At least hear me out, Inspector. Let me tell you the evidence I have that worries me, and then tell me what you think I should do next.”

  The woman was shaking with apprehension, but her eyes met his with defiance and determination. Not unlike his own when he was on the scent, he conceded with reluctant admiration. Even at six o’clock, after a long, draining day, she deserved more than a patronizing pat on the head. Perhaps giving her five minutes of his time would soothe her fears and get him out of here faster than all the bureaucratic obfuscation they could fling at her.

  Normally, he would have taken her into one of the interview rooms, but he hoped to save some of his precious five minutes by checking his desk while he listened. When he had her ensconced in his little alcove office, however, he realized that five minutes would barely get her off the ground. Janice Tanner prattled as if she hadn’t had anyone to talk to in six months. Which may have
been partly true.

  “I’m agoraphobic, you see,” she began, once she’d folded and unfolded her large hands several times. “I don’t usually tell people that unless I have to. I mean, unless I’m about to bolt from a theatre or something. But in this case, it’s how I met Matt—Matthew Fraser, the man who’s missing. He’s agoraphobic too, and we were in this therapy group together. Once a week Tuesday afternoons, at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital. For most of us, especially in the beginning, just getting to the group was half the cure.” She gave a little laugh, then must have misinterpreted Green’s frown of impatience as puzzlement, for she asked him if he knew what agoraphobia was.

  Even if his wife hadn’t been a psychiatric nurse, Green would have known, for in twenty years on the force, he had encountered just about every human frailty, but before he could intercept her, she launched into the topic.

  “It’s more than just fear, it’s pure, paralyzing panic. It hits you unexpectedly in a mall, in a coffee shop, in the street outside your front door, and pretty soon you panic at just the thought of going out. In the group, we talk about ways to survive the panic, and we give ourselves little homework chores to do—open the front door, walk around the block, make a phone call to a store—”

  “I understand, Ms. Tanner, but what makes you think something has happened to Matthew Fraser?”

  “Well, you have to know the whole picture. The group supported one another, that’s the thing. We egged each other on. Most of us haven’t many real friends, so we grew close. We went together on the bus rides, to the mall—”