Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  Janice Tanner had made much of the rotting food and the abandoned dog, but had not mentioned a ransacked living room. Surely this would not have escaped her notice. Could someone have been here since yesterday? Fraser? In Green’s house, it was not uncommon for him to turn the place upside down for something he’d misplaced, but Fraser seemed as if he’d know where every slip of paper was. Had someone else been here? Whoever they were, whatever they were looking for, they’d been in a hell of a hurry. Or a hell of a temper.

  Intrigued, Green examined the books that lay on the floor. The Child and Family Services Act, which detailed the law governing child abuse, as well as its predecessor. There was a heavy tome called Child Witnesses, and another with the lurid title of Breaking the Silence. The latter looked well thumbed, with pages dog-eared and passages underlined. Green began to read.

  “Fuck! What stinks!” The querulous shriek came from the hallway, and Green glanced up just as a young woman stumbled into Fraser’s doorway, shielding her eyes from the daylight and clutching a man’s extra large cotton shirt over her scrawny frame. She recoiled slightly at the sight of Green, and glanced down as if to ensure the shirt covered her crotch.

  “What the fuck is that stink?” she repeated.

  Green took a guess. “Crystal?”

  Her eyes slitted warily. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Extensive vocabulary, Green thought. Matches the super’s. He introduced himself and steeled himself for hostility. She looked like the type whose encounters with police might have been less than amicable. When the hostility came, however, it was not directed at him.

  “What’s he done? What’s the pervert done?”

  “Disappeared,” Green replied. “When did you last see him?”

  “He gives me the creeps. Always sneaking around with that freaky dog of his, locking himself in with six locks like he’s got the crown jewels in there. Won’t even say hi, but I know who he is anyway and don’t want him anywheres near my daughter, so I stay away from him.”

  Green shifted gears quickly. “Has he ever acted suspiciously around your daughter?”

  Crystal held her hand under her nose with a grimace. “What the fuck stinks? I thought I smelled something weird, but I figured it was just lazy Laslo not bothering to throw out the garbage. Smells like shit.”

  With a sigh, Green decided he might never get a straight answer to his questions. Her mind was as jumpy as a spooked cat, and she looked as if she were in dire need of her next dose. He steered her back into the hall and shut the door on the offending odours.

  “When did you last see Mr. Fraser?”

  She chewed at her fingernails. “What day is it? Monday?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday.” She frowned, as if with the effort of rallying her wits. “I don’t think I seen him since last week. Wednesday, maybe? He was going out, all dressed up.”

  “You mean—”

  “For the office. Grey suit, tie, briefcase.”

  “He didn’t usually dress that way?”

  She snorted. “He wore the baggiest, ugliest pants and sweatshirts you could find. Even the Sally Ann has nicer clothes. He couldn’t look dumber if he tried! I mean, he wouldn’t be a bad-looking guy. He’s got wide shoulders and a nice tight—” she paused and twisted her thin lips into a smirk, “butt on him, still got all his hair, even if he wears it like a dork. Way long in the back.”

  “What time did you see him leave in the suit?”

  “I don’t know. Lunchtime? Yeah, “Young and Restless” was on.”

  “Did he seem in a hurry? Did he act strange in any way?”

  “Yeah, he was walking fast. Usually he kind of slinks along, never looks at you, you know? This time it was like he knew where he was going. Plus he didn’t have that ugly dog with him.”

  “Did you see him return?”

  She shook her head. “But he did. I heard him later. Six locks make a lot of noise, and that time he wasn’t quiet about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he slammed the door and banged all the locks real quick.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I don’t know,” she whined, wiping her nose. “All these fucking questions. Six, maybe? “Much MegaHits” was on, so what time was that?”

  Unfortunately, the hectic pace of both Sharon’s and his lives left little room for television, but the music channel’s broadcast schedule would be easy enough to check, and if the show aired at six, the timing was interesting indeed. Six o’clock was close to dinner time. “Did you see or hear anyone else come just before or after him?”

  “Well, I don’t spy on him, you know. My TV was on, and my daughter was talking to me.”

  “Did you hear the dog bark?”

  Her pinched face cleared. “Fuck, yeah. A few minutes after the guy got home. Just about shook the walls down. Then it didn’t shut up for days!”

  And you didn’t bother to check why? Green thought but knew better than to ask. In Crystal’s world, it didn’t pay to be too curious. He held her gaze in an effort to keep her focussed. “Did you see anyone else hanging around outside or in the hallway?”

  She was edging back toward her own door, which she’d left open. “Look, that’s all I know. I mind my own business, take care of my daughter, and I figure what other people do—”

  “Are you talking about Matt Fraser or someone else you saw?”

  She scowled and stepped backwards through her doorway. “I didn’t see anyone. Not then.”

  He thought of the time span between Janice’s visit and his own, during which someone had apparently ransacked the place. “Some other time? Last night or this morning maybe?”

  “I was half asleep. I can’t swear to anything.”

  He pressed his advantage. “But you did see someone. A glimpse at least.”

  “A glimpse is no good in court, I know, and I don’t need the aggravation. I gotta go. That’s all I can say. Maybe someone else saw more.” She swung her door shut and left him standing on her doorstep, staring at the peeling paint. But there was no sound of footsteps from within, and he sensed that she was watching him through the peephole. Merely curious, or something more?

  He jotted down the interview, making a note to catch her again when she was more mellow. Crystal’s “glimpse” might be the only solid lead he found. When he returned to Matt Fraser’s apartment, it smelled none the sweeter for the fifteen minutes of fresh air. Now he began to snoop in earnest. In the bedroom he found a sparsely filled closet of bulky, styleless clothes, among them a navy suit and a handful of skinny polyester neckties, but no grey suit. The dresser contained rows of jockey shorts and neatly rolled black socks, as well as stacks of the shapeless sweatshirts and T -shirts Crystal had described. On his bedside table was an empty glass and a tape recorder but no sign of bedtime reading.

  With his pen tip, Green pressed the play button and heard the soothing strains of harp music and a hypnotic voice inviting the listener to close their eyes. Recognizing it as a relaxation tape not unlike the one Sharon sometimes used after a hard day, he turned it off.

  In the bathroom, the man’s compulsive neatness astounded him. One toothbrush, not the half dozen elderly ones sprouting from the glass that he and Sharon shared in the bathroom. One tube of toothpaste rolled from the bottom, folded towels and a shelf of the latest herbal remedies like ginseng and Vitamin K, plus a half full prescription bottle labelled Zoloft. Green tipped one of the pills into a small evidence bag from his pocket and jotted down the prescribing doctor’s name.

  In the kitchen, the fridge door was pristinely clear, and the wall calendar was blank except for weekly appointments on Tuesdays. Presumably that was his therapy group. But in a drawer, Green finally found something out of place. Or at least oddly placed. He was searching the drawers hoping to find the man’s stash of personal papers—letters, bills, bank statements or even a wallet or day book. He found linens, cooking utensils, tools and then unexpectedly,
a small black book, curled and grimy with age. It was peeking out from under the tray in the cutlery drawer as if it had been hidden deliberately. Green pulled it out and flipped through its pages, which were filled with names and addresses in a small, neat hand. He slipped it into another evidence bag, put it in his pocket and continued his search.

  The man had to have some personal papers. There was no sign of a filing cabinet anywhere, but surely a man as paranoid as Janice described would hoard everything and probably squirrel it away in some secret hiding place. To search the whole living room would be a mammoth task. Papers could be hidden in plain sight, mixed among the newspapers, or hidden behind some volumes in a dusty, unlit corner. It would take a search team hours to comb this place, and that for a case that was not even his. In fact, not really a case at all.

  He flicked on the computer and waited as it hummed and clicked slowly to life. Not exactly state of the art, Green observed, but then the man had little to spare for extravagance. Windows eventually appeared on the screen with a prompt for a password. Green groaned. He should have known that a privacy fanatic like Fraser would use that feature. On a hunch he tried Modo. Invalid. Quasimodo. Also invalid. He pondered his chances of plucking the right name or code from the air with almost no knowledge of the man’s life or interests. He made one last try—Hugo—and to his astonishment the screen lit up with icons. Pulling up a chair, he hunched forward and began to search. It was a short search. Other than his internet browser, Fraser had no software beyond an oldfashioned word processing program and a database. The application files were in place, but there was not a single data file in either program.

  Curious to see who the man communicated with, Green connected to the internet and pulled up his email screen. Not a single email in his inbox. Same story with his “sent” box and his “trash”. Green was astounded. What mere mortal had a completely empty email account? Certainly no one in his acquaintance. Either this man stored all his files in a secret place, or someone who knew computers had wiped his entire system clean.

  Green clicked through subdirectories in search of hidden files, uncovering mostly folders with recognizable program names. Under “web”, however, one folder name stood out from the rest. Mistwalker. Eagerly he clicked on it. Wiped clean. Green sat back in puzzlement. Mistwalker was a peculiar word. Even mysterious, and certainly whimsical for a man as obsessive and analytical as Fraser. But tantalizing as the puzzle was, Green was stymied, for he’d exhausted all his admittedly primitive computer skills. This was a job for the younger guys on the force.

  Yet his snooping had paid off some dividends. He now had the little black address book and, with it, access to the people in Fraser’s life. On his way out, Green paused at the door to examine the locks. Crystal had exaggerated; there were only five. Plus a peephole. Each was sufficient to keep out an unwelcome caller, and two of them could only be locked and unlocked from the inside. There were no scratches or chips to suggest that any of them had been forced. If Matt Fraser had had a caller that night, after he’d arrived home and barricaded himself in, then he had checked through the peephole and opened the door of his own free will.

  Pretty reckless stuff for a paranoid agoraphobic who rarely left his apartment except to walk his dog.

  Three

  “Yessir!” Sergeant Lonsdale sat ramrod straight and spread his hand to encompass both the paltry stack of paper on his desk and the computer humming in the corner. “Any case you want to take a look at, you’re more than welcome, sir.”

  He was a squeaky clean man with slick hair and a glossy smile, but beneath the joviality, his tone was tinged with anxiety. Although he might be happy to have his docket lightened by one file, Green knew he was nervous about such close scrutiny of his turf. Justifiably. Green suspected the rookie sergeant was just passing through Missing Persons on his way towards a comfortable desk in the upper echelons, so keeping his image buffed and his butt covered ranked at least equal to the cause of justice. Green’s unsolicited involvement in a case often presented a risk to both image and butt.

  Ignoring the man’s discomfiture, Green scanned the woefully short file containing nothing but Janice Tanner’s report and the results of Lonsdale’s interview with the building super, which he’d probably conducted by phone without even looking up from the business section of the Globe.

  “Did you contact any relatives?” Green asked.

  “Not yet, sir. No one else has reported him missing, and the man was of age with no suggestion of ill health. He probably just wanted to drop out of sight. Besides, the complainant was a little...” Lonsdale started to twirl his finger but Green’s frown stopped him short.

  “Do you know who he is?” Green asked.

  Lonsdale’s hand strayed to his tie, perhaps hoping that a perfectly centred knot would make up for the slight indiscretion Green had caught. “Yessir, I ran his name. It seemed all the more reason to drop out of sight, in my opinion. People like that don’t change their ways, if you know what I mean. Maybe he was afraid he was about to get caught again.”

  Green considered the idea. It was certainly one explanation for Fraser’s hurried arrival home that afternoon, and for the rapid locking of his door; he’d been one step ahead of some irate father’s boot. It did not, however, explain Modo’s being left to die.

  “Or maybe,” Green countered, “he has been caught again, by someone interested in a more direct form of justice.” He jotted down the case number and turned toward the door. “I’ll just make a couple of calls.”

  Lonsdale made a grasping gesture, as if to retrieve the file for a second look, but Green was already out the door, pondering his next step. Which was to track down an actual next of kin, so that he had more tangible grounds on which to pursue the case. Lonsdale’s file listed the next of kin as unknown, and when Green thumbed through Fraser’s old address book back in his own office, he found no listing for a Fraser or a Mom or Dad. There were, however, some possibilities. Almost all entries were carefully recorded by first and last name, telephone number and address, including postal code. But one was simply a name. Rose. Plus an address in the far eastern suburb of Orleans.

  Several minutes of searching through computer databases yielded a last name to go with Rose—Artlee, not Fraser as he had hoped—and an age. Forty-four. An older sister perhaps, whose name had changed through marriage? On a chance, he dialled the number, and when the cheerful woman who answered the phone confirmed she was Mrs. Rose Artlee, he introduced himself and blithely asked if she were Matt Fraser’s next of kin.

  Complete silence.

  “Hello?” he prompted.

  “What’s happened?” she asked in a voice so low it was barely audible. All trace of cheer was gone.

  “Are you a relation?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  It was a strange game of cat and mouse, but he supposed she’d earned the right to be suspicious. No doubt the press had been merciless during the trial.

  “He’s been reported missing by a friend, Mrs. Artlee. I’m following up to see whether his family knows of his whereabouts.”

  “Oh, no!” she breathed, not a denial of his question but an exclamation of dismay, as if something she’d long feared had come to pass.

  “Do you know something?”

  “No,” she replied as if hastily collecting her wits. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “Mrs. Artlee,” he said, “perhaps I should drop around for a quick chat.”

  “I told you I don’t know anything!”

  “But you sound worried.”

  “Because you said he’s disappeared. Of course I’m worried. If you find him, tell me—” She hesitated. “No, I’ll call back in a few days.”

  He sensed she was about to hang up. “Just a quick chat. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “No! I—I mean I’m on my way out. I’ll meet you…” He could feel her haste through the wires. “At the Tim Hortons on Montreal Road, just off the Queensway.”r />
  She’d hung up before he could get in a word, and he glanced at his watch in dismay. This was not a high priority case. In fact, it was hardly a case at all, and meanwhile, several active cases were bubbling in the major crimes squad, demanding his attention. Not the least of which was Brian Sullivan, who’d been trying to contact him since before noon about his rooming house death in Vanier.

  I’ll drop by the Vanier scene on my way back from Tim Hortons, Green promised himself as he buckled on his radio and headed out his door. Tim Hortons doughnut shops were proliferating across the city like mushrooms, and Green wasn’t sure which one Rose referred to, but luckily it was easy to spot amid the strip mall scenery just north of the Queensway. Inside, a handful of workers lingered over lunch, but Green was able to pick out Rose without difficulty. Only one woman was sitting alone in a booth, with her back against the wall and her eyes glued to the door, a heavy-set woman with a doughy face and short, spiked hair which seemed to be her only attempt at fashion. Round glasses accentuated her moon face, and behind them her eyes were pale and wary. As a peace offering, he picked up two ice cappuccinos before approaching the table. She launched into a pre-emptive strike before he could even introduce himself.

  “I don’t know what I can do for you. I haven’t seen Matt in years.”

  “Why?”

  She looked taken aback. “Why? Because of what he did. I have two daughters, and even if I didn’t, I—”

  “But he was acquitted.”

  “Because it was the word of a six-year-old against him and a whole slew of his teacher friends.”

  “So you’re saying he was guilty?”

  Her jaw jutted out, and the wattle beneath her chin quivered. “Is that so wrong of me? He may have been my brother, but I don’t shut my eyes to right and wrong.”

  “Do you think a whole slew of his teacher friends would? Just because he was a colleague?”