Emmerson-Jones and Leslie Black exchanged looks, and Sharon saw a sudden uncertainty in his. He doesn’t know what to do, she thought, because he doesn’t know his patient from Adam, beyond the anxiety rating scales Fraser had probably filled in during the initial consult. In clinical matters, Emmerson-Jones was not one to venture out on a limb. If he didn’t have his numbers and his data to support his opinion, he said nothing. Yet here, to say nothing might land him in serious professional trouble. In that glance to Leslie Black, he was asking her to go out on the limb for him. Clever little prick, Sharon thought with gritted teeth.
But if Leslie was aware of the dual purpose she served, she seemed unfazed. Sharon sensed she loved limbs, perhaps because she knew the clearest and farthest views could be had from them.
“Yes,” she said without a moment’s pause. “He did believe he was being followed, and he did say that some people would stop at nothing, even after years, and so he—”
Belatedly, she checked herself with a look of dismay, but Mike was not to be denied.
“He what?”
Leslie shifted in her chair, clearly reluctant. “Well, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. Out of context, it sounds ominous, but I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.”
Mike waited patiently, his pen poised.
As the silence ticked on, Leslie obliged. “He said he might have to stop them first.”
“Oh, really!” Emmerson-Jones interjected. “Idle talk in the therapy group, nothing to base a suspicion on, Inspector. People say all kinds of things!”
Mike’s eyes remained on Leslie. “But you think he was serious?”
“I don’t think he was being glib,” she replied slowly. “Matt spoke so rarely that when he did, you knew it was something he’d been worrying over for weeks.”
“Mrs. Black!” the psychologist exclaimed. “If you knew of a possible threat, you should have come to me at once!”
“I didn’t see it as a threat,” she countered, flushing. “Not in the context. I had the impression he meant he’d consult a lawyer.”
“For a restraining order, you mean?” Mike asked.
“It sounded like something of that sort.” Mike’s eyes narrowed. “If he went to a lawyer and not the police, then chances are he knew who was following him. Did he give a hint? Someone from the trial?”
Leslie sat a long while in silence as if she were mentally reliving the group discussions. Finally, she sighed and shook her head. “The group didn’t know about his past, and so his comments were always circumspect. It might have been—”
“I think that’s enough speculation, Mrs. Black. The police need evidence, not your subjective interpretation of what a patient might have meant.” Emmerson-Jones rose and reached for his suit jacket. “I believe we’ve helped you much more than we’re obliged, Inspector. Let’s hope this whole matter is resolved quickly and with happy results.” He held open his door and extended his hand. “Good day.”
“Arrogant putz,” Mike muttered as he followed Sharon out the door. She punched the elevator button and swung around with a mock glare.
“Yes, and thanks to you, he’s going to nail me with the Director of Nursing tomorrow morning. I was handling it my way, Green. How’s he ever going to believe I had no control over you?”
The elevator door slid open, and she stomped in. Once inside, he gave her his crooked grin. “He’s a shrink. That should be obvious to his finely-honed intuition.”
“Yeah, right. Some cops get hunches, and others plod through the facts. Shrinks are no different. Emmerson-Jones has no intuition, but what he does have is a very stiff poker up his ass.”
He laughed, caught her hand and pulled her into his arms. “Sorry. Will you be in big trouble?”
“What can they do, fire me? They can’t afford to, with the shortage of nurses and my ten years’ experience. So they’ll sweep it under the carpet, I’ll stay out of Emmerson-Jones’ way for a while—which will be my pleasure—and it’ll be business as usual. However, you won’t get off that easily. You owe me big time, Green, and a tub of Ben n’ Jerry’s isn’t going to do it.”
“So what’s your pleasure this time?” He bent to nuzzle her neck. “Maybe...?”
She pushed him away. “Not smelling like that! Cooking dinner would be a start.”
The elevator jolted to a stop on the main floor. As the doors opened, he kissed her lightly on the nose. “Okay, I just need to make one quick stop back at the station—”
“Green! It’s past five o’clock!”
He led the way through the heavy glass doors into the garish afternoon sun. Just ahead, his car was parked illegally at the curb with a police sticker slapped on the dash. He paused with his hand on the handle. “This will only take a minute. I have to look something up.”
“For this case?”
He nodded and slipped into the car. “Leslie Black got me thinking of something. Half an hour, I promise, and then I’ll whip up the meanest Kraft Dinner you’ve ever had. And to while away the time...” He fished in his wallet and held out a scrap of paper. “You could always take a peek at this house on your way home and see what you think.”
Without making a move, she grinned. “In half an hour? No time. Wouldn’t want my Kraft Dinner to get cold.”
Five
As he drove back towards the police station against the rush hour, Green glanced at the gridlock stretching along the Queensway in the opposite direction and ruefully acknowledged that his promise of half an hour had been hopelessly optimistic. Especially since he had to travel all the way out to the end of the earth to reach his new home.
The squad room was deserted when he arrived, but fortunately in his absence the records clerk had delivered the Fraser file to his office, where it sat in two large boxes on his desk. Inside were pages of reports, witness statements and interview summaries, in no particular order as far as he could tell. Sitting at his desk, Green resisted the urge to get sidetracked by the interviews and instead riffled rapidly through the pages until he found the name he was looking for.
In his therapy group, Matt Fraser had hinted that he was thinking of consulting a lawyer in order to stop some harassment, real or imagined. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he had used the same lawyer who had defended him so successfully ten years earlier.
Josh Bleustein.
Green groaned. Over the past fifteen years, Green had not won many popularity contests with the Ottawa Defence Bar, mainly because the cases he handled rarely made them look good, but Josh Bleustein had tangled with him more than most. Bleustein was a brawler who took more pleasure in eviscerating a witness on the stand than in arguing the finer points of law. Nearing sixty, a two-pack a day and six-pack a night man with three chins and a paunch to rival Buddha, Bleustein continually surprised people by turning up each Monday morning still alive and well.
And ready to scrap. Josh Bleustein would sooner throw him out of the office than cooperate with him about a confidential case. Green pulled out his day planner, flipped it open to the next day and contemplated the mass of blue ink that filled the page. He had a full day of meetings with his counterparts in urban police forces around the province. The bane of middle management life. The event was about the growing threat of biker gangs, and it included lunch to facilitate networking, as the corporate luminaries called it. He couldn’t skip it, because Superintendent Adam Jules, no doubt with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, had volunteered him to present CID ’s new computerized geographic profiling system.
Fortunately, Green had learned a few middle management tricks of his own over the years, and he’d hastened to draft into service an eager-beaver new detective who actually knew how to operate the thing and who would happily demonstrate his superior wisdom to a room full of inspectors in exchange for a few brownie points in the eyes of the brass. But Green knew that he himself would still have to be there, to look as if he knew what was going on.
But all of this smoke and mirrors technical wizardry p
aled in comparison to a real live case, and Green was getting an increasing sense that Matt Fraser’s disappearance was serious stuff. There was no body or blood stains to point to foul play, but Green knew something bad had happened. He was like a dog on the scent, and right now the trail led to Josh Bleustein.
A phone call to Bleustein’s firm netted him an answering machine and an after-hours emergency number at which there was no answer. Like it or not, meeting Bleustein would have to wait until tomorrow, until he could find time to sneak out of his seminar.
Outside his little alcove office, a door slammed and footsteps thudded across the carpet. Then Green heard a sigh. He peeked out to see Brian Sullivan drop into his chair and flick on his computer. Green glanced at his watch, which read almost six o’clock. He’d left Sullivan at the rooming house over two hours ago, and he wondered what Sullivan could be trying to do on the case at this point. The body had been removed to the morgue to await post mortem in the morning. Ident and the fire investigators would almost certainly still be at the scene, completing their painstaking collection of physical evidence. In the morning, there would be plenty to do chasing down the results of the physical search and canvassing the street again for witnesses. Maybe, as a break from that plodding and often futile exercise, Sullivan might like to slip in a quick visit to everyone’s favourite defence attorney.
Green picked up his notes and Josh Bleustein’s office address and sauntered out of the office. Except for Sullivan, the squad room was empty. The huge former linebacker hunched over his keyboard, sweat trickling down his temples and his sausage fingers dancing nimbly over the keys. His florid complexion had faded, but a dusky hint of high blood pressure remained, reminding Green of the price they all paid for the job. Sullivan was searching the internal police database, and when a mosaic of tattoos filled the screen, he leaned forward to squint at them.
“What are you working on?” Green asked.
“MacPhail and I found part of a tattoo still intact on the victim’s hip just above his groin. Most of it is burned away, but I can make out part of what looks like a young girl. I’m checking to see if it’s on the system.”
“Girlfriend tattoos are pretty common,” Green observed doubtfully. “Part of the love and possession theme of the jailhouse.”
“Yeah, but this is a pretty sophisticated job. Curly ringlets, sort of like Shirley Temple, if you remember your old movies. MacPhail’s going to try to clean it up, so it might help us get an ID on the guy. Ident’s hit a big fat zero with usable prints. Fingers are too burned, and the empty bottle had nothing but smudges.”
“So we’ll be looking at teeth or DNA .”
“But the tattoo might give us some possible relations to check it out against.”
For a moment, Green felt a surge of excitement. Shirley Temple had been a precocious child star with a girlish innocence and a coquettish flair that would be perfect fuel for a pedophile’s dreams. But Green was reluctant to subject Fraser’s sister to the experience of DNA comparison unless he had something more substantial than intuition. No tattoo had been listed among Fraser’s distinguishing marks at the time of his arrest. It was possible he’d had it drawn since then, in which case his sister probably wouldn’t know about it. On the other hand, how likely was she to know about a little girl on his groin anyway?
In the silence, Sullivan rubbed his bloodshot eyes and suppressed a yawn. “Jesus, I’m getting old. These screens are getting harder and harder to see.”
Green clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re on the slippery slope, buddy. Put Gibbs on it. He’s ten years younger than us, and you know how he loves this detail stuff. Besides, I’ve got something else I need you to do.”
Sullivan glanced with alarm at the paperwork in Green’s hand. “What, now?”
He knows me too well, thought Green, no matter how casual I try to be. He knows that when I’m on the scent, I forget to eat or sleep, even forget that a day has only twentyfour hours in it. “Tomorrow. It shouldn’t take long.”
“But Mike, I have to go back to Carillon Street tomorrow. I ran into complete stonewalling today. None of the neighbours saw a thing. In fact, no one can remember ever seeing the occupant of room 2C.”
“Maybe that’s true.”
“And maybe I’m the Queen of England. I figure a visit bright and early in the morning before they’ve had time to get too seriously into the sauce, I might get fewer faulty memories. Give it to Watts and Charbonneau, their manslaughter just took a guilty plea.”
Inwardly, Green grimaced. Watts and Charbonneau were standard-issue detectives, long on plod but short on imagination. Cases with twisty trails were beyond the agility of their brains. “I’d even do it myself,” he muttered, “but I’m stuck in that smoke and mirrors—I mean geographic profiling thing.”
“Hey, don’t knock that. I’m planning to use it to study the pattern of muggings in the east end.”
Green nodded with what he hoped looked like encouragement. In truth, he had no quarrel with geographic profiling. Like behavioural profiling, in the hands of an intelligent investigator, it helped narrow down the search, so that the proverbial needle was in a far smaller haystack. What bothered him was spending precious hours showing off a new toy when he’d rather be out grappling with a real live case. So he tried another approach.
“There’s a remote chance this might be connected to your John Doe anyway and save you plowing through all those tattoos. Plus you get to butt heads with Josh Bleustein.”
“Bleustein? Now for sure I don’t want—” Sullivan started to protest, but broke off when Green plunked Bleustein’s address down on his desk. Rarely did Green actually pull rank on him, but there were times like this one, where despite their friendship, his authority was implicit.
* * *
Despite her misgivings, Sharon’s curiosity got the better of her on the way home and lured her on a short detour past the house in Highland Park. She cruised slowly around the neighbourhood and parked outside for a few minutes, soaking up impressions. Her first reaction was one of horror, followed by intrigue and finally a begrudging twinge of hope. The house was in wild disarray; lilacs heavy with blooms choked half the yard, and a massive maple towered ominously over the roof. The parts of the house that could actually be seen through the underbrush all seemed to need replacing, from the curling roof shingles to the sagging veranda and the grimy windows. It would cost a fortune. Yet the street was quiet, and the small park on the next block had a play structure and benches beneath the graceful boughs of gnarled old trees.
She wasn’t going to admit it to Mike yet, but the place had potential. All they had to do was win the lottery.
The clock on the dash of her Chevy Cavalier read six-thirty by the time she finally picked up Tony from the sitter, dropped by the grocery store and reached their little home. No Corolla. No Green. “Schmuck,” she muttered, thinking of the sweltering house, the dinner to be prepared and a crabby baby to be fed before she could even consider resting her tired feet.
She heard the phone ring before she’d even reached the front door. Swearing, she plunked Tony and the diaper bag down on the front step while she scrounged in her purse for the keys. Two rings. She found her keys and wrestled with the lock. Three rings. She shoved the door open, swooped up her son and dashed into the kitchen to snatch up the phone just before the answering machine kicked in. If it was her husband, he was going to get an earful.
It was Leslie Black. Apologetic, agitated, tripping all over herself. Most unlike the Leslie Black Sharon knew. Leslie said she’d spent the last two hours worrying, because she couldn’t leave things as Emmerson-Jones insisted they be left. Not if Matt Fraser’s life were in danger, or indeed someone else’s, as unlikely as that seemed.
Jamming the phone into the crook of her neck, Sharon dumped her son on the kitchen floor, where he instantly began to shriek. She opened the fridge and began to hunt for some cheese.
“Sharon?” Leslie prompted into the clamour. “I
’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude at the crazy hour.”
“You’re not,” Sharon said hastily. “My son has just become very definite about his wants these days. Like his father. But I’m listening.” She cut up some cubes of cheese, and through Tony’s clamour she tried to focus on Leslie’s voice. The woman was clearly worried.
“Matt may have been further over the edge than I thought. When he told the group he would have to put a stop to this harassment, I told your husband I thought he meant a restraining order. And maybe he did. But I’ve been reviewing my notes and replaying the session in my head, and there was definitely a creepy flavour to it. Matt’s a very quiet-spoken guy, he doesn’t ever show much affect, but there was an eerie intensity to his words. He didn’t look at me—he rarely does maintain eye contact for long—but he was inspecting his hands. Of course, Dr. Emmerson-Jones dismisses any notion of the subconscious, but to me it looked like subconsciously Matt was relaying a message to his hands. To his fists.”
Tony ran out of cheese, and Sharon rummaged in the cupboard for a cookie to silence him long enough for her to consider Leslie’s theory. It was a bit too fanciful even for her clinical sense, but she’d seen too many bizarre twists to the human psyche in her ten years in psychiatry to discount it completely.
“What about his thinking? Do you think he was paranoid?”
“He was definitely paranoid,” Leslie said without the earlier doubt in her voice. “But I put that down to some type of posttraumatic stress reaction. Traumatized people see threat or danger in the most innocuous event and interpret ambiguous or neutral behaviour as negative. After what happened ten years ago, Matt has always seen condemnation or retaliation in the least little thing. If someone bumps into him in a grocery store or looks at him twice, he thinks they know. He doesn’t trust anyone, and he sees himself as an easy scapegoat. And really, till we’ve walked in his shoes, we can’t judge how paranoid he should be, can we? The whole world hates a sex offender, and a pedophile is the lowest of the low. It doesn’t matter that he was acquitted. People remember the accusation and don’t believe the acquittal. He’s a permanent pariah, and emotionally Matt was never equipped to be a pariah.”
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