“Teachers stick together. But the proof was, afterwards, they wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
“But you’re saying they all lied to protect one of their own. And left a six-year-old to twist in the wind.”
She mixed her drink with short jabs of her straw. “I sound bitter, don’t I? Well, I have a right to be. Ten years ago, my brother dragged our family through the mud. Vandals broke our windows so many times we had to move, my little girls got picked on in school, I got let go at the day care where I worked, because—hey, I must have had the same screwed up childhood, right? By the end, my husband couldn’t stand the stress and took off to Calgary. He came back, but not before I’d been through three years of hell on welfare. My brother molested little girls, but we’re the ones who paid the price. So yeah—” she barked out a short laugh, “I guess I’m bitter.”
“You’ve more than earned the right,” he replied. “And I’m not reproaching you for your feelings about your brother, believe me. But when I called, you said ‘oh no’ as if you were worried about him.”
His ploy had the desired effect, and some of the fight died from her eyes. She rummaged in her purse and extracted a package of DuMaurier cigarettes. Ignoring the “no smoking” signs plastered around the walls, she lit up and sucked a grateful breath into her lungs.
“My brother and I were never what you’d call close. I’m eight years older than him, our dad left us when I was twelve, and we had to leave the farm and move to the city so our mother could work. I lost all my friends and got stuck in a crappy little apartment taking care of Matt. He was delicate as a kid. Always had colds or asthma. He cried if you yelled at him, but the kid had brains, and he was really good at making me take the blame for whatever went wrong. Mom never took the time to listen to my side. I was trouble, I admit it. I mean, look at me. I was a big, fat, ugly kid with attitude, and I’m still a big fat, ugly broad. Attitude? In spades. I’ve never been in trouble with the law, I don’t mean that. But I never caught on to the finer points of how to win friends and influence people. Matt did. But that was his downfall too. He never toughened up. He’d rely on his helpless act, and people would rescue him left, right and centre.”
She blew out a lungful of smoke before resuming. “That’s why this trial thing killed him. Sure, he got all his colleagues to rally around, and he played his poor-little-me-wouldn’thurt-a-fly routine, and he got off. But then it all came apart. Suddenly he was alone. I’d had enough, and anyways if I’d tried to help him, my husband would have killed me. His teacher friends dropped him, the school board fired him, and everywhere he went, people pointed fingers. Hell, his story had been plastered over the news for months, and nobody believed for an instant that he was innocent. If this had been farm country and not Ottawa, he’d have been strung up by the balls behind a barn somewhere within days of the verdict.”
She stopped as if suddenly realizing she’d lost her place, and her eye caught the frown of an employee behind the counter. Muttering, she busied herself mashing out her cigarette on the floor. Green waited patiently. He knew what he’d heard when he’d told her Fraser was missing, and no amount of blustery denial on her part would convince him this woman didn’t love her brother. And sure enough…
“Well, you know,” she resumed, and her eyes didn’t meet his, “old habits die hard. I mean, I’ve been taking care of Matt since he was four, and I knew him inside out. I wanted nothing to do with him because what he did makes me physically sick, but I did wonder how the hell he was going to carry on when everyone dropped him. I mean, it was justice in its own funny way, right? I did figure he deserved it, but I got to wondering. I never contacted him, I never answered his calls, and pretty quick he got the message and stopped.”
“Where was your mother during all this?”
“Oh, Mom was in Florida with her new man, pretending she was twenty years younger than she was, and certainly never admitting she had any son at all, let alone a fully grown pervert.”
“Are you the only other family he has?”
She nodded, then stopped herself. “Well, Dad showed up for the trial. That was a treat. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, and Matt didn’t know him from Adam. ‘Just wanted to show my support, son’, and all that crap. I sent him packing.” She chopped at her drink with a vigour that shook the table. “All slick and polished like that, he’d do more harm than good to Matt’s case, and Matt just about came apart at the seams when he met him.”
He propped his chin in his hand and smiled at her slightly. “So you really did look out for him, didn’t you. It’s second nature. And privately, even now, you still worry.”
“Well... I wonder. I mean, ten years is a long time, and I got to wondering if he’d gotten himself together. After the trial, he tried to go away and make a new start, but the word always seemed to spread, and anyways he was no good at starting new. Matt was a kid who liked the same thing for dinner every night, and if you changed the brand of frozen orange juice, he’d notice.” She paused as if caught in the memory. “Anyways, I heard he came back here and found himself an apartment.” Her jaw jutted out again. “But I don’t know what he was doing with himself, and I don’t care. I almost forgot about him.”
“But?” he prompted, not believing her for a second. She said nothing but chewed her lip as if wrestling with how much to reveal herself. He gave her a gentle push. “Something reminded you?”
Her eyes grew shuttered. “He did. He phoned last week.”
“What day was that?”
“Wednesday.”
Green’s pulse jumped, but he was careful to keep his tone neutral. “What did he want?”
“I don’t know. I refused to talk to him.” She paused, her fingers gripping the cappuccino cup so hard it dented. “Look, he took me by surprise, okay? I hung up on him. I was thinking of calling him back.”
“And now you’re worried that perhaps he was in trouble?”
“Well, even Matt had his pride, you know? We hadn’t talked in eight years, so for him to pick up the phone, it had to be something important.”
“You think he needed your help?”
She frowned at him. “I don’t know. How could I know what the hell was on his mind? He sounded all earnest and desperate, like in the old days when he needed me to bail him out. He said, ‘Rose, I have something to tell you’, and I hung up.”
“He had something to tell you. Like, news?”
“I thought it was a confession. That’s why I hung up. All those years, he never once admitted he did it. Even just between us, when the truth wouldn’t have hurt him. But I didn’t want to hear it now, just ’cause it suited him. Fuck, it was over eight years ago, I’d put it all in the past, and no way was I letting him drag it all out again.”
“But now you’re worried perhaps it was something else entirely?”
She didn’t reply. Around them, the doughnut shop was empty and the staff was cleaning equipment. A Celine Dion ballad wafted over the air waves, crooning about love. Wrapped within herself, she seemed oblivious. She’d never been a pretty woman, but he saw there was a maternal strength to her when she wasn’t trying to bluster. Worry pinched her brows and quivered at the corners of her mouth. Again she seemed to be debating the wisdom of revealing her softer self. Finally, she sighed. “No, I thought maybe the guilt had been eating at him for ten years, until he’d finally gathered up the courage to tell me. So when I hung up on him, maybe it was the last straw. You see, I’ve always thought that some day, when he finally faced what he was, my brother was going to kill himself.”
* * *
Green was driving down the Queensway, halfway to Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, when he remembered Brian Sullivan’s rooming house death in Vanier. He cursed. Sullivan had wanted him to look at the scene before the body was removed and use his fabled intuition to see if he could detect anything amiss. The staff sergeant had already dismissed the case in his own mind and urged his subordinate to do the same. Death by misadvent
ure. Specifically, setting your bed and yourself on fire by smoking while intoxicated—a tawdry but common enough end to a vagrant’s life. But obviously Sullivan was not so sure.
Brian Sullivan and he had been rookies on patrol together over twenty years ago and had remained friends ever since, despite their differences in temperament and rank. Where Green was impulsive and fanciful, Sullivan was practical and meticulous. Green made wild intuitive leaps, while Sullivan steadfastly filled in the gaps. In the past, before the changing face of police work and Green’s promotion to the senior ranks had drawn him further and further from the trenches he loved, the two had made a perfect investigative team. Now, Sullivan and his colleagues from Major Crimes conducted all the routine investigations without need of Green’s input, while he sat on planning committees and chafed with frustration. Sometimes he bulldozed his way onto a case out of sheer boredom, or the fear that no one else on the force knew what they were doing. Occasionally, Sullivan took pity on him.
Perhaps Sullivan was simply taking pity this time, but he had sounded as if he really did want Green’s opinion, and a request from Sullivan was not to be taken lightly. Green glanced at his watch. It was almost two-thirty, which meant that after this detour he wouldn’t reach Rideau Psychiatric until after four. That was cutting things close, but still within the realm of possibility. Surely most of the doctors and therapists on the day shift would still be at work at four.
He took the next exit ramp off the Queensway and headed back east, deftly skirting around road construction and through side streets on his way deep into the city’s shabby east end. Historically, Vanier was the home of Ottawa’s francophone working class community, with roots back in the lumbering days, and it had retained a strong French Catholic flavour. Like much of the inner city, however, it had become an uneasy mix of indigenous French, transients down on their luck, aboriginals from up north, and immigrant families from
all over the Third World. Proud shanties stood side by side with cheap apartments and rooming houses which saw a constant turnover of tenants with uncertain pasts and even more uncertain futures.
On a dingy side street off Montreal Road, Green spotted Sullivan’s unmarked blue Taurus parked outside a structure that ought never to have passed its building inspection. The ancient, three-storey rooming house squatted in a patch of sodden weeds, its mottled grey bricks steaming in the midafternoon heat. The only evidence of its recent fire was some blackening around the second storey window and a thorough soaking from the fire hose. In a line behind Sullivan’s car were the red fire marshall’s vehicle, the Forensic Identification van, the black coroner’s van, and another police-issue Taurus which Green suspected belonged to the arson squad. Sullivan has really called out all the troops, he thought as he pushed through the crowd of curious locals, logged in with the uniform on guard, slipped paper shoes on his feet and ducked under the police tape.
The reek of burnt chemicals and charred flesh assailed him even before he stepped over the threshold, and involuntarily he covered his nose. In the street, the afternoon heat had been oppressive, but inside it was a sauna. Within seconds, he was damp with sweat. He could hear voices and footsteps milling throughout the building, but he followed the boom of a familiar Scottish brogue up the stairs and into the front room on the second floor. The room was bare except for a partially burned crate under the window and a mattress on the floor whose charred springs poked through the residue of blackened cloth. Three men were bent over the mattress, conferring in low tones and affording Green only a brief glimpse of burnt sneakers hanging off the edge of the bed.
Sullivan was a big man, and his shoulders seemed to fill the tiny room. He’d left his suit jacket in the car, and his white shirt was drenched with sweat. Above the collar, his neck and face were an unnatural crimson that Green hoped was only from the heat. Drawing in a cautious breath, Green stepped through the door. At the sound, Sullivan swung around and a smile of relief lit his florid face.
“Mike, about time! Dr. MacPhail was about to give up on you and take the body away.”
The tall, rangy Scot laughed and clapped Green on the shoulder with his gloved hand. “Worse luck, lad! I’m still here, trying to get some ideas from what’s left of the poor bugger.”
The Ident Unit had turned a strong spotlight on the bed, and Green recognized one of their senior officers bent over his camera, photographing every section of the body. The bright light spared nothing. Curled fetus-like on the bed was the remains of something human of indeterminate age, sex or even colour. Most of the body was charred beyond all recognition, and on the upper body not a scrap of skin nor a single hair was left intact. The rank stench of burnt meat was choking.
Black spots laced Green’s sight, and he forced shallow breaths to fight down the bile in his throat. Dead bodies had never been his forte, but he was determined not to give the pathologist further fuel to mock him. MacPhail had spent the last twenty-two years awash in corpses and whiskey, and his sense of humour was decidedly off-kilter. Green forced his attention to practical details.
“Have you got an ID ?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Still working on it. It’s an adult male, MacPhail’s guess is medium height and weight, but he’ll know more after the autopsy. As usual, nobody’s talking in the building here, at least not to the cops. This is a rent-by-the-week room, cash in advance, no questions asked. Nobody knew who he was, and he didn’t talk to anybody. He just signed in last week under the name Jake, but that’s all we’ve got to go by. We’ll be checking missing persons reports and canvassing the street, but it will probably come down to dental records or DNA once we get some possibles. Not much left of the fingers.”
Green heard the weary resignation in Sullivan’s voice, and he sympathized. This was a pointless and unlamented end to what had probably been an aimless life. They’d both seen them countless times before, life’s losers who drifted from one dive to another and from one high to another, until fate and their own stupidity stumbled upon each other, leaving the police force with the job of mopping up. Perhaps, even after all their hard work, they would never identify this one, and worse still, perhaps no one would even care.
Yet Sullivan had clearly not called him here to offer his sympathies. Green turned away from the body briskly. “Let’s go outside, and you can fill me in.”
To his dismay, however, Sullivan shook his head. “I want you to look at this body carefully and tell me what you think.”
Green sighed. The request was vague, but he knew it was not trivial. Sullivan thought the body was telling them something, and he wanted to know if Green saw it too. Green forced himself to turn back to survey the scene. Even through the water and soot that covered everything, Green could see that the room was almost bare. On the floor lay a few blackened objects, one of them recognizable as a glass bottle. The remains of the bed sat in the corner, burned away to bare springs. On it, the body was curled on its back, grotesque but almost peaceful in repose. The skin and clothes were burnt away, leaving nothing but a blackened shape. Smoke and flame damage was extensive around the body, but quite limited in the rest of the room.
Green was not an expert in fires, but he sensed what was bothering Sullivan. Something seemed unnatural. He’d seen bodies burned to death before, and usually they were found huddled on the floor by the door, making a last desperate effort to escape. Even drunks who passed out in bed and lit the mattress on fire usually woke enough to try to get to the door. Green pointed this out dubiously, but Sullivan was ready for him.
“We do see it sometimes, Mike. The guy was smoking in bed, fell asleep, and the cigarette dropped on the mattress right beside him. Smolders a while before it catches, and it’s the smoke that kills them before they wake up.”
“That’s just it. It looks like this burned hard, suggesting maybe an accelerant helped it along. Otherwise the mattress would probably have smoked a lot more.”
Sullivan nodded. “The fire investigators and Arson are looking at it.
” He pointed to the empty bottle which an Ident officer was just slipping into an evidence bag. “The label’s burned off, but it might have been some cheap brew.”
“Alcohol doesn’t burn hot enough for this.”
“No, but maybe something homemade, or even something more flammable. If the guy was lying down and tried to drink from the bottle, he’d spill some on himself and the mattress. The fire investigators have taken their samples, and we’ll have to wait for their findings.”
“Then what started it?”
“Most likely a cigarette. He could have dropped the cigarette in the booze, and it went up so fast he had no time to react. It’s a theory, anyway. But...” Sullivan’s rugged, square face creased with dissatisfaction. “What do you think, Mike?”
Green’s eyes roamed the room, studying the layout and the position of the body on the bed. MacPhail had begun cautiously bagging what was left of the hands, and his impatience was showing. “It’s possible, I suppose,” Green replied. “But it looks set up to cause maximum damage to the body. Damn convenient.”
Sullivan nodded. “Convenient how?”
“Because it makes it hard to identify him. Plus—I’m trying to imagine how a guy, lying in bed, spills booze, sets himself on fire, and then lies back to enjoy the blaze. The pain should have driven anyone up out of the bed in two seconds flat.”
MacPhail straightened up and nodded to his assistant. “Well, I’m taking him away, lads, before he decomposes in this heat. Michael, we’ll be checking him upside down and sideways to determine what substances he had in his system, and whether they were sufficient to render him unconscious entirely. In the meantime we’ll wait for the fire investigators to complete their investigation before we draw any conclusions about accident, suicide, or what have you.”
Sullivan glanced at Green, whose mind was already tracking a new possibility. In her missing persons report, Janice Tanner had estimated Matt Fraser’s height as five foot ten and his weight about one hundred sixty-five pounds, figures which came pretty close to MacPhail’s estimate of medium height and weight for the dead man. Of course, it also fit half the men in the city, and why Fraser would leave the sanctuary of his apartment and the protection of his dog to hole up in a roach-ridden room in Vanier was a mystery. And if he had come here to die anonymously, why had he waited six days before doing the deed? Gathering the courage?
Mist Walker Page 5