Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  He ignored the classic ex-wife invective as he struggled to grasp the implications of the news. “But she doesn’t know where I live. Where’s she going to find me?”

  “I told her to go straight to the police station. That’ll be a nice bit of irony. Hannah hates cops, thanks to a few encounters with your buddies on this side of the mountains— the usual drugs, under-age drinking, panhandling with her friends on Hastings. So she’s going to sashay into your station with a chip the size of a Douglas fir and boy, I’d love to be a fly on that wall.”

  “Okay, okay.” Green’s mind raced. “What should I do?”

  Ashley laughed, a high pitched giggle that had once reminded him of bells, but now sounded like a witch’s cackle. “If I had the answers, do you think she’d have gone off to see if the grass was greener with you? She’ll be looking in the goddamn desert.”

  “Did she bring any clothes? Has she got any money?”

  “Of course she does! You think I’d let her stomp out of here without a cent? I gave her two hundred dollars, plus she cleaned out Fred’s wallet before she took off, just to make a point.”

  An intelligent thought finally drifted within grasp. He sensed the hurt beneath the anger and spoke more softly. “Okay, Ashley, I’ll try to help. Do you want me to persuade her to go back home?”

  There was silence on the phone, and when she spoke, some of the anger had gone. “No, Mike. I think this is something she has to do. And...if you can keep her just for a bit, maybe till school starts again, who knows, maybe it will help her. God knows, shrinks at a hundred plus an hour haven’t.”

  Keep her till school starts! Two months? His astonishment bulldozed the fragile beginnings of common sense he’d been rallying, so he signed off as quickly as he could get a word in. Once he’d hung up, he glanced at his watch. Her overnight flight from Vancouver had almost certainly arrived in Ottawa. In fact, Hannah should be walking through the front doors of the station any second.

  Ignoring the questioning looks, he barrelled out of his office and downstairs to intercept her before Constable Blake had a chance to meet her. But there was no teenage girl in the lobby, and a quick check outside in the street revealed no sign of her either. Reluctantly, Green approached Blake to inquire if she’d turned up and to alert him to her imminent arrival. He tried to sound as if his daughter came to visit all the time, and if the desk officer was at all intrigued or titillated, he kept his face carefully deadpan.

  “What does she look like?” was all he asked.

  Green hesitated, for he had no idea. The latest picture Ashley had deigned to send him was of Hannah as a chubby preteen, complete with braces and braids. “I’ll get a full description of her clothes and current hair style from her mother if it matters, Blake, but I should think her name, Hannah Pollack, is sufficient. Just call me when she arrives.”

  He returned upstairs to phone the airlines and learned that most of the overnight flights from Vancouver, even those that puddle hopped through every provincial capital along the way, had arrived at least an hour earlier. Even allowing for her catching the cheapest shuttle into town, she should have arrived. But there were still some avenues to explore before calling Ashley back and whipping up some serious concern.

  Green spent the next few minutes on the phone checking flight manifests with the police at Airport Security and determined that Hannah had indeed boarded the midnight flight from Vancouver, which had arrived in Ottawa at eight in the morning. However, no one at the Ottawa airport was able to confirm whether she’d disembarked.

  Reluctantly he phoned Ashley back with this update, and she surprised him with impatience rather than worry.

  “Welcome to life with Hannah, Mike. This has been my life for almost ten years. She’s never where I expect her to be, never when she’s supposed to be, just like you. She pleases herself and never thinks what effect it might have on the rest of us. Or if she does, it’s just ‘oh well, too bad’.”

  “But she doesn’t know Ottawa, and she has no friends or contacts here. Does she?”

  “Doesn’t matter. She’ll find out where the kids hang out, and within hours she’ll be settled right in.”

  “So you’re saying she won’t even call me?”

  “Oh, she might. I’ve given up trying to predict what she’ll do. All I know is, the more buttons of ours she can push, the better. She knows you’re calling me, she knows we’re at each other’s throats—”

  “We’re not.”

  “But she hopes we are. She knows she’s got us both good and worried, and when she’s bored of the game, she’ll probably turn up. Either there or back here.”

  “Good God, Ashley—”

  “Don’t ‘Good God’ me, Mike! She’s your goddamn daughter with your goddamn genes, and I’ve done the best I can. No thanks to you!”

  He calmed her down enough to obtain a description of Hannah and the clothes she was probably wearing. When he raised the topic of photos, scanners and emails, Ashley began to dither, but agreed to enlist her husband’s help. She warned that it might take a while, because she would have to locate him at work, and he was often on the road.

  While he waited for the photo to arrive, Green ran the description by the baggage personnel at the airport, but to no avail. He swallowed his pride and checked with Blake again. Nothing. Sitting at his desk twirling his pen, he felt helpless. He couldn’t concentrate on the mundane details of his work, but he could do nothing more to find Hannah or to restore the equilibrium of his life that had suddenly spun off course. Hannah was here. She was visiting him. Oy veh is mir.

  When his phone rang, he snatched it up hopefully, but Barbara Devine’s voice snapped through the wires.

  “Mike, what’s going on now? Jules tells me you’ve opened a Major Case file on Matthew Fraser’s death. Why?”

  Matthew Fraser... Green collected his scattered thoughts and forced them to focus on the case. Last night, the Fraser investigation had been foremost in his thoughts. Now, when he could barely think, he had to find an intelligent way to tell Devine that she might have screwed up and missed the real villain in the case.

  Devine must have interpreted his silence as stonewalling, because she announced that she was coming down. Green snatched up his notes on the Fraser file from the corner of his desk and headed out of his office, intercepting Devine just as she strode out of the elevator.

  He gestured her back inside. “Let’s go grab a coffee. I need to pick your brains about the case again.”

  “That’ll cost you a lot more than a cup of coffee,” she shot back. “At least a double scotch.”

  Upstairs in the police cafeteria, he chose a table by the window in the deserted room, hoping the blue, sun-lit sky and the spectacular view of the museum would soothe some of the storm clouds gathered around her. Her make-up was impeccable, but one wing of her lacquered ebony hair was askew, and her eyes shot daggers over the rim of her cup. He waited until she’d had her first hit of caffeine before he broached his theory.

  Predictably, her response was outrage, for no investigator likes to be wrong. “That’s utter nonsense, Mike. We considered doing those penile arousal tests before the trial. That is, the defence considered the tests, but the truth is they’re unreliable. So these results prove nothing.”

  Already worried and frazzled, Green had neither time nor patience for bruised egos. He had a case to solve, and even more importantly, a daughter to find. He stirred his coffee slowly while he counted to five and mustered the limited tact at his disposal. He deliberately couched his theory in tentative terms, because until he had MacPhail’s ruling on the cause of death, his conclusions, however compelling, were pure conjecture. “I think Matthew Fraser may have been murdered. I think he was innocent of the abuse, but figured out who really did it. So let’s just play what if, okay? Let’s look at what other men were around in Rebecca’s life ten years ago.”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to put innocent people through all this again.”

/>   His tact began to desert him. “To flush out the guilty one? Yes.” He held up his thumb. “Number One on my list. Quinton Patterson.”

  She stared him down across the table for a long, sullen moment. Finally she seemed to sag, and a flicker of worry pinched her brow. “You like to start small, don’t you?”

  “He had daily access. And aren’t stepfathers and mother’s boyfriends the most frequent perpetrators of sexual abuse against little girls? In fact, don’t pedophiles often hook up with the mothers just to have access to their children?”

  “Statistically, yes,” she admitted without enthusiasm. She blew across her coffee to cool it. “That doesn’t make all stepfathers bad guys.”

  Green put his finger on an inconsistency that had nagged him all along. “But Patterson was a good-looking and promising young professional. He could have had the pick of the pack, yet he chose a vulnerable single mother saddled with two messed up children. Alcoholic on top of it, I understand.”

  Devine shook her head sharply. “The drinking came afterwards, when not only her daughter’s but her son’s life went off the rails. When I first met Anne Patterson, she was one of those women who turned heads without even trying. Anyway, vulnerable would have appealed to Quinton Patterson, giving him a chance to play white knight. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s a take-charge kind of guy.”

  Control freak is the term I’d use, Green thought, but she had a point. Quinton had come on the scene just as Anne was being hammered in court by her ex-husband, allowing Quinton to show off his dazzling legal skills.

  Devine took a careful sip and wagged her finger. “I certainly wouldn’t put him ahead of her biological father. Becky spent every second weekend with Steve Whelan, and he was a piece of work. Selfish and manipulative, used the kids to get back at their mother. I could see him telling Becky she owed it to him.” She mimicked a wheedling male voice. “‘Make Daddy feel good, honey. Mommy’s so mean to Daddy, but Becky loves Daddy, doesn’t she? Daddy’s so lonely...that’s my special girl.’”

  Green grimaced. “I get the picture. But Steve Whelan took a strange stance; he never believed Fraser was guilty, and he accused Quinton flat out of blaming Fraser to deflect the guilt from himself. Said Quinton planted the idea in Becky’s head. If Steve were guilty himself, why wouldn’t he lie low and hope the spotlight stayed firmly on Fraser? Why invite scrutiny?”

  Devine rolled her eyes. “How many times have criminals thought themselves invincible, Green? And how many times has their own sick agenda—in this case his hatred of Patterson—won out over common sense?”

  Often, Green had to admit, but asked if at any time in the investigation the father had come under suspicion. She sat a few seconds in silence, her long wine-red nails clicking the tabletop as she thought. Her coffee sat forgotten at her elbow. “No,” she replied finally, sounding faintly surprised. “At least not for sexual abuse, and I suppose that’s the biggest point in his favour. As usually happens in nasty custody disputes, they both accused each other of every heinous crime under the sun, but that one never came up, even though the father was flinging all kinds of accusations at her—”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, mainly that she was neglecting the children while she ran around with her new man. That Becky cried in her sleep when she came to visit him and didn’t want to go back to her mother’s—”

  “And that didn’t make you the least bit suspicious that all was not kosher with the respectable Quinton J. Patterson?”

  She flushed, and her tapping fingernails came to an abrupt halt. “We had our man, Green. And to be honest, I didn’t consider anything Steve Whelan said credible. He was insanely jealous, and he was trying to pry the kids from their mother.”

  Plus, Steve Whelan doesn’t have the baby-faced charm and the fancy connections that Patterson has, does he? Green thought. An uncharitable thought, but probably true. The harmless young Fraser had presented a convenient scapegoat for a lot of people in this case.

  Including his fellow teachers, Green realized with a jolt. It seemed a long shot, but as long as they were considering all the men in Rebecca’s life who had access to her, it ought to be considered. “What about Ross Long? Any dirt stick to him?”

  At first Devine looked baffled by the name, then incredulous. “Fraser’s teacher friend? What the hell does he have to do with anything?”

  “He was the only other male teacher in the school. But he was older and more of an authority figure, so maybe Becky was afraid to point the finger at him.”

  Devine waved the red fingernails in dismissal. “Straws, Green. Why not the school custodian? Maybe he sneaked her off behind the boiler.”

  “Becky would have squealed on the custodian way before she turned on a helpful young teacher whom all the kids liked.”

  Devine stared at the ceiling as if seeking patience from some celestial source. “There was never anything to implicate Ross Long. Normal guy with a wife, kids and a house in Barrhaven. How’s that for squeaky clean?”

  He cringed inwardly, but there was not the slightest glint of mockery in her eye. “Appearances can be deceiving,” he replied, deadpan. “I’m still keeping him up there. Every bit as much access as Fraser, and with his years of experience, probably a lot more practised at keeping it under wraps. What did you dig up about the guy?”

  She shrugged, her eyes bored. “Dead end guy stuck in a dead end job. He wasn’t a very good teacher; he hadn’t changed his methods in years, and he trotted out the same old yellowed lesson plans year after year. Didn’t matter what the curriculum said. The kids found him boring, the parents tried to get rid of him or at least get their kid out of his class—”

  “Oh?” he demanded sharply.

  “Nothing sinister, Green. Just a waste of their year, and to this kind of parent, a less than scintillating year does irrevocable damage. In our day, we had some terrific teachers and some awful ones, and we just endured them, and it all balanced out in the end, right? But the Duke of York parents are from the ‘flash cards in the cradle’ school, who see a child’s brain turning to mush every moment it goes unchallenged.”

  Green eyed Devine with curiosity. The woman was full of intriguing surprises. He would have pegged her as one of those “never waste an opportunity” types herself, whereas he had cherished those endless idle hours of childhood. Hours he could wander lazily down dead-end pathways in his mind, exploring, poking, pondering and maybe occasionally discovering something. He pictured himself being rushed through today’s childhood, herded through minor league hockey and cub scouts towards some invisible goal and given no chance to linger along the way. He would have hated that childhood. Thank God his parents had had no energy for herding and no idea of the goal anyway. They were too busy putting one foot in front of the other, avoiding the demons in their memory and the yawning chasm in their hopes by never raising their head to look beyond the present. Just one more legacy of the Holocaust.

  “Anyway,” Devine added, breaking into his thoughts, “Ross Long had two daughters of his own who seemed perfectly well adjusted, and—” She frowned as if to catch an elusive memory. “I didn’t write it down, but I’m pretty sure he had a woman on the side. Another teacher on staff, who’d been quietly transferred to another school a year earlier to avoid a scandal. The parents would have loved the ammunition to force his transfer. It’s almost impossible to get rid of a teacher, just like a cop. The union’s all over you like a dirty shirt, and there are a thousand contractual hoops the principal has to jump through to get someone’s competence reviewed. But you can transfer them through quiet agreement.”

  Green sighed. He was not looking forward to Tony’s encounter with the school system, not if his son was anything like himself. He thought of Hannah and longed to check on her, but not with Devine in earshot. He forced himself to get back to business.

  “Consider this,” he said, continuing to play devil’s advocate. “Ross’s little piece was out of reach, and everyone thought he
was a real loser. Isn’t that the profile? Guys feel inadequate and disrespected, so to boost their spirits, they pick on someone even more powerless and needy?”

  “Millions of guys feel crappy and belittled, but they don’t turn to kids! It’s a long way to connect the dots.”

  “Which is exactly my point about Fraser himself. For my money, Long has as good a profile as Fraser.”

  “But the little girl didn’t accuse Long. She accused Fraser.”

  Another point taken, he conceded, aware that he was only thinking with half his mind. The other half hovered somewhere out in the vast unknown between Vancouver airport and downtown Ottawa.

  “Okay,” he said briskly, anxious to get back to the search for Hannah. “That’s three. Is there anyone else who should be on the list? Grandfathers, uncles, coaches or clergy who were close to Becky?”

  She clicked her nails in thought, then slowly wrinkled up her nose. The effect was oddly endearing, once again out-ofcharacter with the corporate image she strove to project. It occurred to him she might be a very different woman away from the office and out of her power suits.

  After a moment’s reflection, she shook her head, and Green reviewed the suspects grimly. Although Devine was reluctant to see any of them as likely culprits, her information gave them all plausible motives for Sullivan and his team to sink their teeth into.

  “One last question,” he said as Devine was crumpling her styrofoam cup and preparing to rise. “Any one of these guys could have done it. Besides Matt Fraser, who gets your vote?”

  Her reluctance vanished in a flash. “No contest. Steve Whelan.”

  Eleven

  When Green rushed back to his office, there was still no sign of Sullivan or Hannah. Likewise, Constable Blake at the front desk reported no sighting. When Green called up his email, however, there was a new one from Fred Pollack which wasted no words. “Photo attached.” While Green waited impatiently for the photo to download, he put in a call to the staff sergeants in charge of the uniform patrols in the East and Central East districts. After a brief explanation of the situation, he asked them to distribute Hannah’s description and photo to the street patrols, particularly in the downtown and airport areas as well as on the bus routes in between. He was just finishing the request when the photo began to fill his screen. Transfixed, he stopped to watch.