Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  She disappeared into the house, and Green turned to look at their acquisition with dismay. The name certainly suited. Modo stood on the driveway, rain dripping from her ears and tail. Her back was hunched, her huge head bowed, and her eyes gazed up at him timidly. Her tail gave one faint wag before she sank down onto her belly.

  “Oh, that’s just great. Going on strike already!” He tugged on the leash. “Come on, Modo. Inside.”

  At the sound of her name, the dog’s ears perked up, and she got to her feet. Encouraged, Green tried again. “Come on, Modo!”

  Obediently the dog trotted behind him up the stairs into the house, where Green found Sharon in the kitchen, already setting up the baby gates.

  “She’s a traumatized dog,” she said. “So we have to be very gentle with her. She has to feel accepted, so we can’t shut her off by herself.”

  “And how are we supposed to know how to treat a traumatized dog?”

  “I’m going to assume the same way as a child. With gentleness, patience, closeness and security. So for starters, why don’t you take Tony and her to bond in the living room while I make dinner?”

  He could see she was on a mission, and no amount of caution or logic would sway her. She spent her days caring and healing, whereas his days were filled with danger and distrust. It had been that very boundless compassion that had first attracted him to her, but sometimes it blinded her to the dark side. Modo looked harmless enough, but she was huge, and who knew what she was capable of? Tony would snap like a twig in her jaws.

  With all the innocent curiosity of his age, Tony was already poking his fingers through the gate at her and chattering excitedly. Modo lay still, but she was watching.

  “I’ll take Tony,” Green replied, scooping his son into his arms. “You can do the bonding bit with the dog.”

  It was past nine by the time Green had finished the bath and story ritual and had tucked Tony into his crib. When he returned to the living room, he found Sharon sprawled on the living room sofa with her nose buried in a book. Her eyes were smudged with fatigue, but they lit up gratefully when he handed her a frosty bottle of Upper Canada Lager.

  The dog had stretched herself out over Sharon’s feet and acted as if she were never going to let her new mistress out of her sight. Green stepped over the dog to snuggle next to Sharon on the couch. Modo emitted a low growl.

  Green nuzzled the soft curls at the nape of Sharon’s neck. “ Oy, Levy, what have you done?”

  She laid the book down with a grin and took an appreciative sip of her beer. “I’ll get Janice back under control tomorrow. Emmerson-Jones will have to get her meds increased.”

  “So you think this fear of being followed is all in her head?”

  Sharon shrugged. “Janice is as suggestible as they come. She was stalked and brutally raped a few years ago, so she sees danger in every shadow.”

  Free association is a bizarre thing, Green reflected, as an idea popped into his head. Maybe it was just alcohol mixed with the exhaustion of a wild day, but he wondered why he hadn’t made the connection earlier, for Janice had been one of Fraser’s only confidantes. “Speaking of shadows, has she ever mentioned the name mistwalker?”

  Sharon stopped with her beer bottle poised at her lips. “Your thought processes do the oddest things, Green. Explain.”

  He told her briefly about the empty folder in Fraser’s computer, and she shook her head. “Sounds spooky. Like someone walking the edge. I don’t think Janice would pick a creepy name like that. Bubbles would be more her style.”

  He sipped his beer in silence, troubled by the stray fact that fit nowhere. “Maybe mistwalker was not one of Fraser’s friends, but the name he’d given the mystery person he was tracking. Maybe the folder was his repository for all the information he’d been collecting on them. In which case, either he’d wiped it all out before leaving his apartment, or someone else did.”

  “How is the trail of Matthew Fraser going, by the way?”

  He told her about Fraser’s frantic last days and the fire that ended his life. “I don’t have MacPhail’s autopsy results yet, but I don’t think it was an accident. Either he killed himself, or someone else killed him. Something very peculiar is going on.”

  She lay in his arms without speaking for a moment, but he sensed she was wide awake. Finally, she drew back to look at him gravely. “In that case, I have something to tell you. This is absolutely confidential, Mike. Leslie and I could both be in deep shit if it ever came out. But if Fraser is dead, I think it’s important you know, because it may have some bearing.”

  She described her phone conversation with Leslie Black, her visit to the library and her perusal of Fraser’s file. Green didn’t interrupt, but he puzzled over the conflicting opinions he’d heard about Fraser in the last couple of days.

  “Honey, he had a tattoo of a little girl on his groin,” he protested. “Even his lawyer and his sister—who’s known him all his life—thought he was guilty. Now, on the basis of a bunch of tests and interviews years after the fact, these shrinks are saying he wasn’t?”

  “Well, they can’t say that. What they did conclude was that he probably wasn’t a true pedophile. Children didn’t turn him on.”

  “But I’ve heard lots of court cases about those plesthmograph tests. Some guys can fake them.”

  Sharon tapped the book she’d been reading. “True, a man can try to suppress his natural response, shut his eyes or even substitute his own fantasies for the pictures. But—”

  “So all that tells us is that Fraser may have been smart enough to dupe two professionals.”

  “But you said he was shy and retiring. Not the type to march into an expert psychiatrist’s office, cocky enough to think he could dupe him. Besides, he had nothing to gain if he succeeded, and a lot to lose if he failed. He’d already been acquitted, and people had moved on. He never made the results public, never even told his therapists.”

  Green thought about the Child Abuse Register the CAS had mentioned. Fraser might have been trying to garner proof to get his name removed, but this testing had been done three years earlier, and Fraser had never told a soul. The whole damn thing didn’t make sense.

  “So why do you think he did it?” he asked.

  “Maybe to satisfy himself,” Sharon replied. “To have an objective, professional expert tell him he’s sexually normal.”

  What guy needs a shrink to tell him what turns him on, Green wondered, and his skepticism must have shown, because she shook her head impatiently. “This is a very insecure man, Green, and especially after all he’d been through, he may have wondered if there was some dark secret deep within himself that even he didn’t know about.”

  He chuckled and snuggled her into the crook of his arm. Sharon was usually the epitome of pragmatism, second only to Brian Sullivan in reeling Green’s wild flights of fancy back to earth. “Freud hijacked your brain?”

  She didn’t laugh. Instead, she picked up the second book that lay at her side. “It’s a long shot, I agree, but it’s possible. Humour me and listen. The psychologist thought Fraser had suffered some early trauma or abuse which he didn’t remember. Now I know it’s possible to fabricate or distort memories; people do it all the time, unconsciously and without devious motives—”

  “Absolutely. Eyewitnesses drive us crazy with that. They colour the memory or fill in the gaps, or remember things as they think they should be. Memory is not an instant replay button.” He grinned. “It’s why we love forensics in court. Forensics is ‘just the facts, ma’am’. Memory is a creative process.”

  “But on the flip side, it is possible to repress the memory of bad things that really did happen. If the trauma or abuse is too terrifying or painful and the child has no escape, they may escape mentally, by blocking out the experience or by taking themselves out of the situation in their mind. That’s called dissociation. People in shock are in a partial dissociative state. They’re there in body, but they’ve blocked out their feelings so the
y’re not experiencing the whole pain.”

  “Partial dissociative state?” he said dubiously. “I’ve always called it numb.”

  “But to be numb, the mind has to block stuff out, or separate feelings and experiences into compartments in their head. Come on, Mike, you separate yourself into compartments all the time. You deal with a bloody murder all day, yet when you walk through our front door, you put it out of your mind.”

  “But that’s a conscious effort, and I have to work hard at it. Every cop does.”

  “But it gets easier, doesn’t it? And that numbness you bring on yourself when you face a tragic case, sometimes that creeps into your feelings at home here too. We call it being desensitized. But you have a healthy adult mind, and you have some control over your life. You can quit your job or take a transfer if you can’t stand it, and you know that escape hatch is there.”

  Green sobered. How many times had he seen officers bail out for just that reason, because they could no longer keep the carnage at work from spilling into their personal lives? How many times had he seen them scavenge for that numbness at the bottom of a bottle?

  Sharon’s dark eyes glowed as her conviction grew. “But a child who’s abused from an early age and who can’t escape the relentless pain and fear—they can’t do anything but dissociate or block out. It’s a powerful survival tool, but it leaves them with few other skills for handling stress or facing problems, and it leaves them with huge holes in their memory. Even as adults, they may dissociate under stress and do things they have no memory of.”

  “Don’t tell me you think Fraser abused this girl after all and had no memory of it!”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, I think he was afraid that maybe he’d abused her and didn’t remember it.”

  He opened his mouth to protest further, but she swatted him playfully. “Listen! You said he was obsessed with the case and had all these books on memory and trauma. He probably bought them to learn about the girl who accused him, but maybe when he read about the link between early abuse and dissociation, he began to fear that the deception lay not in the girl’s mind but in his own.”

  In his twenty-odd years of policing, he’d encountered just about every twist the human mind was capable of. He’d interviewed men too drunk or high to remember bludgeoning their best friend to death the night before, psychotics who’d thought they were God’s avenging angels, psychopaths who’d calmly fed their victims to their dogs before leaving for work. But this idea was perhaps the most convoluted ever. “So you’re saying he was really innocent but didn’t know it, so three years ago, he went to the sex guru and learned that no matter how screwed up he was, little girls didn’t turn him on?”

  She ignored the disbelief in his tone. “It fits his psychiatric history perfectly, Mike! Let’s say before all this started, he was just an eager young teacher who loved kids and wanted to go the extra mile for them. There was nothing perverted about him, he was just shy and nerdy, probably felt more comfortable around children.”

  He grew serious, listening closely to see how her bizarre theory matched up with the picture he’d uncovered in the past few days. “That was the general view of him among the other teachers,” he acknowledged reluctantly.

  “Okay, so for being such a nice guy, he gets accused of sexual abuse. He must have felt completely sandbagged. And to make matters worse, when he defends himself and wins, he discovers nobody believes his innocence, and they drop him like a leper. No wonder he ended up paranoid, suicidal and afraid to go out.”

  In spite of his skepticism, Green’s interest was piqued, for in this crazy quilt of facts, a pattern was emerging. He took a slow, thoughtful sip of beer. “His friend Janice, his lawyer, his sister, even me... Everyone saw this guy as weak and overwhelmed. But now I’m not so sure. He’s been trying to fight back. He fought to defend himself in court, even though it meant putting the child through hell. When everyone turned against him, he picked himself up and left town to start over. But even then, he was driven to understand the girl and why she did it. Unlike some of his more cynical fellow teachers, he didn’t see six-year-olds as inherent liars.”

  Sharon’s eyes danced, her fatigue quite gone. “So he started researching. And when he learned about the tricks the mind can play, he began to doubt himself. He gets himself evaluated and learns that he likely wasn’t guilty.”

  The pattern grew clearer. Green sat forward excitedly. “That leads him to the logical next step. If he didn’t molest the little girl, why did she accuse him?”

  Sharon shrugged. “Maybe she misinterpreted what he did, or someone else blew it out of proportion. There’s a lot of hysteria surrounding pedophilia these days.”

  “No, the investigating officer said the girl was very graphic. There was no physical penetration, but she described explicit acts of fondling.”

  “Could she have been mad at him and wanted to get him into trouble? She was a kid, and she might not have realized how far things would go.”

  Green mulled the idea over in his mind. It explained the girl’s changing her story and ultimately recanting. “Well, apparently she was a problem child, so I guess that’s possible. But Devine was adamant the abuse had really occurred. She said little children don’t lie about such things. Nor can they make up the details she gave.”

  “Devine wouldn’t be the first officer to get overinvested in a case, Green. Present company included.”

  He was too absorbed to be sidetracked. “But there was testimony from psychiatrists and experts. Not enough to get past reasonable doubt, but pretty convincing. They all thought she showed classic signs of abuse.”

  She gave him a long, knowing look over the top of her beer bottle. “I know what you’re thinking. The obvious conclusion. Someone else molested her, and she pinned it on Fraser.”

  He pointed his finger at her. “Bingo. I bet that’s exactly what Fraser concluded. And after three years of poring over documents and articles, I think he’d tracked down who.”

  He thought of the body lying on the mattress in the rooming house, of the fire that had burned so hot and fierce around the bed that the charred remains had been almost impossible to identify. He jumped to his feet so abruptly that the dog cringed in fear. “I bet that fire was not an accident, not a suicide, not a nutcase who flipped out! Fraser may have been a little neurotic, but he knew reality from delusion, and someone found out. I think this was a goddamn, coldblooded, premeditated murder!”

  He reached for the phone, punched in Brian Sullivan’s home number, then listened impatiently through four rings and the voice mail greeting. “Brian, meet me in my office first thing in the morning with the autopsy results on the rooming house victim. As of now, I want this officially upgraded to a homicide investigation.”

  When he hung up, Sharon was looking up at him with a bemused smile. “I’ve done it now, haven’t I? I sense some long nights alone. Me, my son and our trusty new companion.”

  He smiled, stretched over the dog on the floor and nibbled her ear teasingly. When the dog lifted her head sharply, he chuckled. “I have a feeling she won’t let me near you anyway.”

  Ten

  After the stifling week, Friday dawned a glorious, cool, rain-washed blue. At nine o’clock, after a long battle through the rush hour, Green strode across the squad room towards his office, scanning the room for Sullivan. His mind was already in high gear, but he detected a curious hush in the air as detectives raised their heads to watch his progress. For a moment he wondered if the prime minister had been assassinated, or if Jules was on the warpath about some dismal bungling on his part. Jules had been furious at his skipping out on the conference Wednesday, and as punishment was threatening to assign him as coordinator of the inter-provincial anti-gang initiative. Given that coordination and team work were such strengths of his.

  But the atmosphere was more one of titillation than of tension, and his question was soon answered by the desk clerk, who waved a pink message slip at him.

  �
��Inspector Green, this woman has called you three times. Ashley Pollack, from Vancouver. She was pretty angry that I wouldn’t give her your home phone number.”

  Green glanced around the squad room. All the officers were too new to the squad to know about his ex-wife, but to judge from their open grins, someone had tipped them off. Sullivan was nowhere to be seen, but the prehistoric Constable Blake was doing his stint downstairs at the main desk. Meddling putz.

  Green snatched the number and disappeared into his office, careful to shut the door. As he dialled, he felt a surge of anxiety. He hadn’t spoken to Ashley in years. Her only communication had been through lawyers, and then only when there was bad news about Hannah, and she wanted him to solve it. Or rather, she wanted money to solve it. Three calls in the space of two hours signalled serious desperation, especially since it had been four a.m. in Vancouver when she’d placed her first call.

  When her strident voice came on the line, the fifteen intervening years seemed to melt away, and a vivid image of teased blonde hair, sulky eyes and a querulous pout sprang to his mind. True to form, she wasted no time on niceties. “About time! Goddamn police force hasn’t changed a bit. Easier to get information out of the CIA.”

  “I’ll give you my home number—”

  “Do that! Like it or not, Hannah is your responsibility too.”

  “What’s wrong, Ashley?”

  “Hannah’s on her way to visit you.”

  Green sat down with a thud. Intelligent thought deserted him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she left last night. I think she caught the red-eye out of Vancouver, so she should be there any minute.”

  Still no intelligent thought on the horizon. “You think? What the hell is going on!”

  “I mean that’s where she said she was going when she stormed out the door. She seems to believe life will be better with you. That you’re her dad and it’s time she got to know you. I tried to tell her you’re a jerk, but she’s got to see that for herself.”