Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

“Oh, I know. I read the news just now, saw him laying the curse on me.”

  “Jules is concerned he’s going to sue.”

  Green probed his bandaged temple gingerly. “Just let him try, I’ll bury him.”

  Sullivan didn’t smile. “All the same, Jules wants you to keep out of his way. Patterson can be a persuasive sonofabitch.”

  Green’s temper flared. “Why didn’t Jules just pick up the phone? Why send you?”

  “He didn’t send me, Mike. For Christ’s sake, can’t a guy come to see how you are?” The dusky red had returned to Sullivan’s face, and his gaze was evasive.

  Green eyed him sharply. “Okay. But you’re here for another reason too. Something’s not right.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “What?”

  Sullivan cast Sharon a questioning glance before returning to Green. “You sure you’re up to this now? It can wait, I was planning to take my boys to the air show anyway.”

  Green didn’t say anything, just leaned back and waited. He knew he had to look healthy for Sullivan to unburden his worries, and he hoped his act would be good enough. Sullivan looked tired, and the crease of worry over his brow ran deeper than usual. A moment of silence ensued before Sullivan sighed, fished out his notebook, and began to speak. Over the next fifteen minutes, he filled Green in on his visit to Steve Whelan and to the hospital. Green listened, pressing his fingers to his temple and willing his scrambled brain to put things together.

  “So, bottom line,” he observed, when Sullivan finished, “is that, even after all this time, the disgruntled ex is still fingering his arch rival Quinton Patterson as the molester, and saying the loving mother covered for him.”

  “Yeah, to protect her new wealth and status.”

  “At the expense of her daughter?” Green frowned. “Seems a bit of a stretch.”

  “A stretch? You’re obviously not yourself. You love stretches.”

  Green pondered the observation wryly, unsure why he was reluctant to admit the obvious. Only the day before, he’d been arguing the case for Patterson’s guilt with Barbara Devine, and the intervening events had not improved the man’s image one bit. Even Rebecca’s email appeal made sense in this context, for exposing Patterson would slice through the very core of the family bonds. Patterson had certainly tried every way he could to keep Green from his wife and stepdaughter. He’d been obnoxious and threatening, and to top it off, Green had him to thank for his scrambled brains. Patterson was desperate to protect something. But was it his wife and stepdaughter, as he claimed? Or was it his own ass? It would be a long, hard fall from the carpeted halls of McKendry, Patterson and Coles to a cell in Kingston Pen.

  Yet despite all Green’s years dealing with human depravity, he found himself hoping that Patterson’s concern was above board. The man had undertaken the task of loving someone else’s angry, rebellious daughter and had tried to stick by her through all these heart-wrenching years. Few men would do as much, he reflected with a twinge of guilt.

  “Brian, you saw father and stepdaughter together. How did they strike you? Close? Loving?”

  Sullivan grunted. “This kid is not into loving, not so’s you can tell. Prickly as a cactus. But I didn’t get a creepy feeling. And she calls him Dad, for what it’s worth. Calls her real father Steve.” Sullivan flipped through his notes, as if trying to recreate his impressions. “In fact, I’d say she was more angry at her mother than her father. Almost like her mother was the one causing all the grief in the family.”

  Which she would have, in the girl’s distorted perception, if all those years ago she had sold her daughter’s innocence for a plush and pampered lifestyle in the Glebe. But before he could voice that observation, Sullivan’s cellphone rang. It was the clerk in Major Crimes. Green listened as Sullivan asked a few clipped questions, jotted down a number and rang off, immediately punching in another number. As he waited, he glanced across at Green.

  “Speevak, the forensic ondontologist. He’s got some results for us. I—” He broke off as a voice crackled over the line. Sullivan introduced himself, then listened. The conversation was brief, and as Green waited, he saw a look of dawning astonishment pass over Sullivan’s face. When he’d rung off, Sullivan raised his head.

  “This absolutely takes the cake! The crispy critter? It’s not Fraser. The fucking teeth don’t match!” He chuckled wryly. “I wouldn’t like to be in the Police Chief ’s shoes when Quinton J. Patterson learns this.”

  * * *

  Sullivan was barely out the door before Green crashed on the sofa with relief. For once he was grateful for being an invalid. Let Jules and the Force’s legal beagles handle the fall-out from Patterson’s wrath. Let Sullivan go back to his tattoo search, and let the Fraser file revert to a simple missing persons. Important, but not a homicide. He sensed there was something definitely off-kilter about this whole case, but right now he couldn’t think of it through the incoherent mush his brain had become. He was dimly aware of Sharon pulling the cover up over him, touching her lips softly to his brow and whispering, “Sleep, love. I’ll go get Tony and pick up a few groceries.”

  At least he thought that’s what she’d said. Beyond that, he was aware of nothing until the phone rang, dragging him from a deep, cobwebbed sleep that robbed him of all sense of time and place. When Sharon didn’t pick up, he staggered off the sofa and found the phone by its fourth ring, praying it was Hannah.

  At first he was greeted by silence, followed by a brusque, wary “Sharon Levy, please.”

  He mustered enough authority to reply in kind, indicating that she was out and could he take a message.

  “Damn,” came the most unprofessional reply, followed by “Sorry...uh...are you her husband, the police officer?”

  Suddenly the voice sounded much younger and more insecure. Green felt his hopes surge. “Hannah?”

  “No,” the young woman replied. “This is Safe Haven calling, about your wife’s friend.”

  Green pawed through the cobwebs. Safe Haven? Sharon’s friend? Finally, as if from eons ago, he remembered, and felt a twinge of concern. “Janice Tanner? What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not sure. She’s disappeared.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Green was sitting in the back of a cab on his way downtown, trying to organize his thoughts. He knew he shouldn’t be going anywhere, shouldn’t even be out of bed, but fortunately adrenaline kept the fatigue and headaches at bay. His sense of uneasiness had returned stronger than ever. It didn’t make sense that people kept disappearing in this case. First Fraser, then Hannah and now Janice. He felt as if events were unravelling before his eyes.

  Safe Haven was a deliberately unobtrusive house in a mixed neighbourhood of retail businesses and low cost housing. He’d been there often over the years to investigate threats and to interview victims, so a couple of the staff knew him by sight. By the time he arrived, the director herself had come in from home. Pamela Pascale was a briskly efficient woman who acted as if there was very little human depravity she had not seen. She raised an eyebrow briefly at his bandaged head then bustled into the sitting room as if bruises were second nature to her. Perhaps they were.

  “We wouldn’t have called you normally, Inspector, because women come and go here all the time. But Janice hardly ever left her room. Came down once or twice to get something in the kitchen but then beat it back upstairs like a scared rabbit. Any time the front doorbell rang, she jumped. So I was very surprised when she left, and when I heard about the phone call, I was even more surprised. We were hoping it was your wife.”

  “What phone call?”

  “One of the mothers took it early this morning. Janice apparently talked for only a minute or two, then without saying good-bye to us, without even going upstairs for her things, she disappeared out the door.”

  “Perhaps she’s planning to come back.”

  Pamela nodded. “That’s why we waited. But Sharon said she was being stalked, and she was certainly fearful enough.
It got us concerned.”

  A very subtle pain was beginning to pulsate behind Green’s left eye. He shut his eyes, hoping to ease it while he thought. The simplest explanation was that Sharon herself had called, but a quick phone call home went unanswered, as did a call to Sharon’s cellphone. He scowled. Where was she? She’d taken the day off so she could hover, yet she’d been out now for well over an hour. How long could a few groceries take?

  He looked at the trim, no-nonsense woman waiting expectantly in the silence, and forced himself back on track. The next step was obviously to interview the mother who took the call. Pamela summoned the young woman, whose barely concealed insolence suggested that her previous encounters with police officers had not been gratifying. But she was clear on her facts and willing enough to share them.

  “Can’t say if it was a man or woman. Could have been a man with one of those faggy voices, or could have been a woman who smokes two packs a day. Sounded kind of like they were trying to fake it, you know?”

  “Did they ask for Janice Tanner by name? As Janice? Ms. Tanner?”

  “As Janice Tanner. ‘May I speak to Janice Tanner, please? I believe she checked in two days ago.’”

  The mystery caller was well informed, Green thought, as well as reasonably educated, from the sound of it. “What could you overhear from this end of the conversation?”

  The young woman shrugged. “She didn’t seem scared. Seemed happy to hear from the person, almost like she knew them. It was a quick conversation, and mostly she listened. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, and ‘Of course I will. I always will.’ Then ‘Sure, where?’ And she hung up. Grabbed her bag and went out.”

  “Did she seem upset? Excited?”

  “Both, but excited, more like.”

  Green pondered the bits of conversation the young woman had overheard. It sounded very much as if someone had asked for her help, and without question she had offered it. Without fear or sober second thought. There were not too many people for whom Janice Tanner would desert her safe haven and leap to the rescue. Green could think of only one.

  Fourteen

  It was the middle of the Saturday day shift by the time Sullivan arrived back at the station from Green’s house in Barrhaven. His first duty was to phone Matthew Fraser’s sister and let her know that her brother was not the poor man who had died in the fire. She sounded relieved but querulous.

  “What happens now? Inspector Green’s accident was in all the papers, linking the burn victim to the old abuse case. Does this mean my brother’s disappearance just gets dropped? He’s still gone, you know.”

  He reassured her that Matthew Fraser would still be an active missing persons file, then rang off, anxious to get on with his own investigation. The burn victim was a John Doe again, and Sullivan was back to trying to trace his identity through missing persons reports and through the fragment of tattoo on the man’s groin.

  In the autopsy, MacPhail had estimated the victim to be five feet seven inches tall and a hundred and forty pounds and had surmised from the condition of his liver that he was headed down the road to chronic alcoholism. The odontologist had observed that although the victim’s teeth had been atrocious, suggesting that he lacked either the finances or the will to make dental care a priority, the amount of wear on the teeth showed that he was relatively young. Probably in his twenties. At least ten years younger than Fraser.

  Armed with these descriptors and the Shirley Temple tattoo, Sullivan searched the missing persons database and spent the next couple of hours tracking down every hit he made. In the end, he’d turned up nothing. A couple of families were faxing dental records for comparison, but he was not hopeful. One family lived in Sault Ste. Marie and their son, a world adventurer, had been missing for fourteen months. Another man had disappeared from work about the same time as several thousand dollars had gone missing from his company’s payroll.

  By two o’clock, Sullivan’s eyes were burning from staring at the computer screen, and he was ready to call it a day. Outside, the glorious, blue-sky afternoon was perfect for the air show. Savouring the idea of a Harvey’s hamburger and an ice cold coke with his sons, he logged off the computer and headed out the door. On his way down toward the parking garage, he passed near the Ident labs and caught the sound of murmuring from within.

  The Ident guys never seemed to see the light of day. When not down on their hands and knees at crime scenes, they were holed up in their labs, fiddling with chemicals and swabs and powders, teasing out the microscopic pieces of physical evidence that would nail the guilty to the wall. They were the only guys he knew who had orgasms over a fingerprint whorl and threatened bodily harm if you breathed on their scene. But they could also be a godsend.

  Looking for a bit of banter to lighten his day, Sullivan poked his head into the lab and saw his friend Lyle Cunningham perched on a stool, peering at his computer. His latest new trainee was glued excitedly to his side. Cunningham glanced up in surprise at the intrusion.

  “Hey, Brian! Just the man I was thinking of. Come look what I’ve done to your tattoo. MacPhail lifted it right off the body, and we’ve stretched it and photographed it, taken out the burnt bits. Come take a look. I think it will be much easier to trace now.”

  Curious, Sullivan stepped into the room, recoiling from the smell of chemicals, which the Ident officers never seemed to notice. Cunningham had the tattoo blown up on the screen and Sullivan could see quite clearly now that it had once been a fine multicoloured specimen in black, gold and skin tones. Not a little girl at all, but the head of a woman with snakes coiling about her head.

  “Medusa,” Cunningham said. “Cute. Our tough guy has culture.”

  “Medusa?” Sullivan asked dubiously.

  “Yeah, she was a temptress from Greek mythology. Anyone who so much as looked at her died.”

  Sullivan grunted. “Says something about our guy’s experience with women, eh? And his level of education. Let’s see if we can get a hit.”

  Cunningham called up the local police database and entered the new descriptors of the tattoo, trying Medusa, woman’s head and Greek myth. Three men came up. One had a picture of his girlfriend, another was sixty-two years old, but the third was a hit on all counts. White male, height five footseven, weight one-forty, age twenty-four years. Name—

  “Holy shit!” Sullivan exclaimed.

  * * *

  When Green arrived back home from the shelter, Sharon’s Cavalier was in the driveway, and she was in the living room, wearing a path in the carpet. She flung her arms around him, gave him a hug and a playful swat before dragging him to the sofa.

  “A note would have been nice,” she exclaimed. “Something like ‘I’m not on my way to Emergency’.”

  He was about to launch into an explanation about Janice’s disappearance, but Sharon held up her hand. Her chocolate eyes danced, and she seemed unusually ebullient even for her. In a flash, she disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with the cordless phone.

  “A zillion messages. I was just starting to listen to them, and there’s one you won’t want to miss.”

  It was a nurse in the ER at the Ottawa General Hospital, following up on Green’s treatment. “Post-concussion symptoms can be tricky, so please give me a call to let me know how you’re doing today. The number’s 555-0204.”

  Green gave Sharon an impatient look, but she waved him on. “Listen!”

  “Oh—and also a young woman was here a few minutes ago asking for your home phone number. I told her we don’t divulge personal information pertaining to patients. She said she was your daughter, but the media’s been playing all kinds of tricks, so I told her nothing. Hope that was the right move.”

  Green disconnected and dialled the hospital with shaking hands. Fortunately, the emergency room nurse had just returned from an exam room and was writing up a chart.

  “She was in about noon, I’d say, asking about you,” the nurse said. “She didn’t look like the press, I admit, but you can’t be to
o careful. She’s gone now.”

  “If she shows up anywhere in the hospital, please give her this number. It’s very important. Make sure everyone knows.”

  Her voice chilled. “We’re not an answering service, you know.”

  Green quelled his agitation. At least Hannah was alive and well and was finally trying to make contact. Her approach showed some resourcefulness too. He thanked the woman and prepared to hang up when his brain belatedly tuned in.

  “Did she give any indication where she was going?”

  “Well, she was inquiring about the woman who was hurt by the police car. Asking where she was. She may have gone up to her floor.”

  Green jotted down the number, thanked the woman hastily and dialled again. A bored nasal voice announced the surgical floor. When Green introduced himself, the voice dropped an octave.

  “We can’t give out any medical information to the police.”

  “Certainly not, this is a personal call.” In his most frazzled fatherly tone, Green explained his predicament and the woman seemed to thaw.

  “Blue hair, you say?” Her voice faded as she turned from the phone. “Chantal, didn’t you say there was a blue-haired girl here earlier today, to go with the green-haired one? Yeah, when was that?”

  An unintelligible conversation ensued against a backdrop of PA pages and electronic beeps. When someone finally took the phone, it was another woman. Probably Chantal, Green deduced.

  “A teenage girl was here a couple of hours ago. In fact, she did say she was your daughter.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Okay. A bit unkempt, I’d say. Worried about this patient.”

  “Anne Patterson?”

  “Yes, she wanted to know if she was going to be all right.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Well, we couldn’t tell her anything, of course. But the patient’s husband and her daughter were here, so I steered her to them.”