Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

Green winced. In the mood Patterson was in, God knows how he’d react to Hannah. At the very least he’d fill her mind with enough angry invective against her father to scare her away for hours. On a more sinister level, perhaps he’d unleash on her the rage he felt for Green.

  “What did they do? Put her in her place?”

  There was silence over the phone, and Green could hear his own heartbeat. He hoped Chantal was merely trying to remember.

  “No, I don’t think so. Actually I think they went off together. I heard them talking about food.”

  When Green hung up, Sharon was looking at him expectantly. “Well,” he said. “The good news is she’s in town and still in one piece. The bad news is she’s hooked up with a man who hates my guts.” He glanced at his watch. “They were going to get some food. Maybe they went to the hospital cafeteria or one of the little restaurants in the vicinity. If we hurry—”

  He rose from the sofa and was heading for the door when she blocked his path. “You’re going nowhere, Mike. You’re absolutely grey.”

  “I’ll catch a nap in the car.”

  She started to shake her head, but he faced her down.

  “Sharon, this is not your call.”

  She stared up at him unblinking, and the seconds ticked by before she nodded. “Fine, I’ll go. I’ll take Tony, and you get some rest!”

  After she’d left, Green stumbled back into the living room and collapsed on the sofa, his head throbbing. Modo had been watching Sharon through the front window, and now she came over to rest her muzzle on his chest. Her large amber eyes gazed at him, full of concern. Absently he reached down and stroked her silky ears, drawing a strange comfort from her warmth. He knew he ought to call the station, and even Ashley, about Hannah, but he hadn’t the strength. He closed his eyes to gather it.

  He was yanked awake some time later by a loud volley of barking, through which he could hear the very faint but incessant ringing of the bell. Before he could mobilize himself from the sofa, the front door swung open and Sullivan strode in.

  “Geez, Green, you’ve got to move out of Barrhaven. This forty-minute drive is killing me!”

  Green frowned out the window into the street. The afternoon sun was still high in the sky, and there was no sign of Sharon’s car.

  “What time is it?”

  “Three o’clock. I’ve been trying to call, but I kept getting the answering machine, and I knew you had to be home.” Sullivan pocketed his mirrored sunglasses, and without them Green could see the frank relief in his eyes. “You’ve been sleeping, I’m glad to see.”

  “Three o’clock! Fuck!” Green propelled himself off the sofa in search of the phone.

  “I’ve got some unbelievable news, buddy,” Sullivan began, following him into the kitchen and opening Green’s fridge to fish out a coke.

  Green found the phone, held up his finger to forestall Sullivan, and punched in Sharon’s cellphone number. It rang seven times before he gave up. Sharon and her cellphone had only a passing acquaintanceship. Even when she actually remembered to take it, she rarely remembered to turn it on. Self-preservation, she called her lapses. She had so little time to herself that she didn’t want to be on constant call.

  He dialled the station, where he was assured of an answer, although not the one he wanted to hear. No one had seen or heard from Hannah, and now that she knew her father was home on sick leave, she was unlikely to turn up at the station in search of him. “But she doesn’t know where I live,” he shouted at the hapless clerk, “so for God’s sake keep an eye out.” He hung up and rested his head in his hands, feeling defeated. It was three o’clock, and Hannah had last been spotted at noon, presumably heading off for lunch with Quinton and Rebecca. So far, Sharon’s search had not been successful. Surely she would have called otherwise. If Green wanted to find Hannah, there was only one option left.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, head in hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “The kid will show up, Mike. So will Sharon. I’m telling you it takes forever to get anywhere from out here.”

  “Tell me about it. But she should have called.”

  Sullivan pointed to the phone. “Maybe she did. You’ve been sleeping through all my calls.”

  Feeling sheepish, Green accessed his messages and left them to run on speaker phone. He felt like an old woman, running in futile, agitated circles. Sullivan eyed him thoughtfully, then reached for the fridge again. “When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

  Green couldn’t remember but suspected it was breakfast. While messages droned in the background, Sullivan rummaged in the fridge and produced a container of what looked like Singapore fried vermicelli.

  “Any idea how old this is?”

  Green cast his mind back but couldn’t recall Chinese takeout for several weeks. On the tape, Mary Sullivan was enthusing about the Highland Park house. “Too old,” he replied. “I’ll settle for some soup.”

  Sullivan pointed to the phone. “Mary says that’s a beauty, by the way. And if you like, I can help you fix it up.” He heated two cans of vegetable soup with the finesse of a shortorder cook and rummaged through cupboards for bowls, leaving Green to picture himself as a handyman, elbow deep in buckets of plaster. He was about to decline Sullivan’s offer graciously when the tape announced the next message, which stopped both of them in their tracks.

  “Sharon? Inspector Green?” came a breathy voice Green recognized. Janice Tanner! She sounded excited. “Oh, damn. I just wanted to say I think things are working out. I’m off to meet Matthew Fraser. He’s okay, but he needs me to do something for him. I’ll be in touch when I know more.”

  The message clicked off, and Green stopped the machine, needing time to think. Sullivan served the soup and sat down, looked perplexed and oddly uneasy.

  “Well, at least that’s one worry off our plates,” Green said.

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know what this means, but you’ll never guess who my crispy critter is.”

  “Who?”

  “Billy Whelan.”

  Green stared at him, dumbfounded. For a full minute, neither man said anything while they processed the implications. Their soup sat on the table, forgotten. Eventually Green picked up his spoon and began to stir the steaming liquid absently. “Okay, let’s get the picture here. Matthew Fraser rented the room in Vanier—we know that because the building manager ID ’d him—but six days later Billy Whelan, brother of Rebecca Whelan, ends up dead in it?”

  “Correct.”

  “Jesus. Any other tidbits of information up your sleeve?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “I’ve got the standard lines of inquiry going. Known associates, recent movements. Charbonneau is also trying to track down the parlour where Billy got his tattoo, and Gibbs is doing research on the Greek myth about Medusa.”

  Green arched his eyebrow. “Gibbs is researching Medusa? What the hell does she have to do with anything?”

  “You know who she is?”

  “Vaguely. She was this beautiful young woman whose hair was turned into snakes, and her eyes were so deadly that men turned to stone if she even looked at them. Perseus lopped off her head by using his shield as a mirror.”

  Sullivan laughed. “There you go. See, that master’s degree came in handy after all. With my simple farm country education, I thought the guy just didn’t like women.”

  “But why—?”

  “It was Medusa, not Shirley Temple, that Billy Whelan had tattooed on his groin.”

  “Whoa!” Green said. “I’d say he had a run-in with a pretty deadly dame.”

  “That’s why I’m trying to track down the tattoo parlour. He’s been arrested by us six times, first when he was a young offender, but he only got that tattoo last year. I’m hoping he told the tattoo guy something about its significance to him.”

  Green blew on his soup and ventured a sip, which scalded his tongue. “I don’t see what relevance that would have, though. We might learn about his less than charmed love life,
but his death—his murder—that’s got to be connected somehow to Matthew Fraser.”

  “I’m not assuming anything, just using standard operating procedure.”

  “But what the hell else could it be?” Green asked. “It’s too damn big a coincidence not to be connected.”

  “Probably. But besides the deadly girlfriend angle, according to our drug guys, Billy Whelan was a cocaine street dealer. A two-bit bad guy, belonged to one of the local puppet clubs the Quebec Hells Angels are courting to run their street action. He’d probably never make the cut—not tough enough—but the word is he’s been trying to get out of the business. Maybe he pissed somebody off. Torching the joint is one of the ways they’ve been known to eliminate liabilities.”

  “Cement shoes are still the method of choice,” Green countered. “No messy body or crime scene for us to sink our teeth into. By all means, put somebody on it, but my money’s still on the Fraser connection. Get Billy’s picture over to that Iraqi building manager to see if he can put him in the rooming house or with Fraser.”

  Sullivan nodded impatiently as he slurped his soup.

  “Already covered. Watts is on his way over there right now. And I’m just on my way over to search Whelan’s apartment and interview his neighbours.”

  Green remembered a small detail he’d forgotten in all the intervening hoopla. “Check the girl down the hall in 817. I think she was his girlfriend, and she says he stole a bunch of money from her. Sounded like he was about to skip town.”

  “Maybe she’s the Medusa. Did she look like the vindictive type?”

  Green shook his head. “She knew I was a cop. If she’d killed him, she’d never have told me a thing.”

  “Still, if he was taking off, it’s another sign he might have pissed off some nasty people.”

  Green returned to his soup and sipped in silence as he pondered the bits of disconnected fact. With Janice Tanner suddenly blundering into the picture, he felt a nagging sense of urgency. The heat and sustenance of the soup spread through him, but his thoughts still felt sluggish. Nothing seemed to fit. Billy Whelan had taken his sister’s abuse hard. He had slipped into alcohol and drug use and tangled himself up in gang crime. But his father said before the abuse, Billy had been a model son who’d taken care of his mother and sister all the time he was growing up. The abuse had spun his life off course. Perhaps he’d been consumed with rage or guilt that his little sister had been violated, and over the years he’d nursed a personal vendetta against the man he believed was at the root of it.

  But how did this vendetta lead to his charred remains in a rooming house in Vanier?

  Sullivan was devoting his attention to his soup and sopping up the dregs with a slice of bread. He seemed to be respecting Green’s need to think, perhaps awaiting the wild flight into fancy that he’d come to expect.

  “Okay,” Green said eventually. “Let me run with this a moment. Humour me. We know—at least we thought—Fraser was trying to track down Rebecca’s abuser, and he checked out of his apartment and into the rooming house under a false name because he thought he was being followed. So let’s suppose he was being followed, but not for the reasons he believed. Rebecca’s and Billy’s lives have both been a mess since the trial, and Billy’s had plenty of time to look for someone to blame. He fixes on Fraser. Fraser ruined his sister’s life, ruined his life, and is walking around free. So Billy tracks him down, starts following him, and on the day Fraser disappears, he follows him to his apartment. Maybe he even knocks on the door, tries to get in, which is why Fraser freaked out and left in the middle of dinner. But Billy still manages to follow him to the rooming house, and...” Green stopped at the blank wall ahead of him. He’d been on a roll, but now things didn’t seem to fit.

  “And?” Sullivan prompted, ever the pragmatist. “There’s a gap of six days in your chronology. Did Billy wait six days before confronting Fraser?”

  Green’s thoughts started to roll again. “He may have been trying to gather the courage, or figure out exactly what to do. We do know in the interim he took his girlfriend’s cheque and made plans to get out of town. And we know the two guys clashed—”

  “You suspect, Green. We don’t know a fucking thing.”

  “We’ve got one guy out to avenge his sister’s abuse, and the other guy paranoid as hell that someone’s after him. Recipe for a clash.”

  “So you’re thinking Billy tracked Fraser to the rooming house with revenge on his mind, but Fraser turned the tables on him? Killed him in the panic of the moment?”

  About to agree, Green stopped in mid-thought. Panic of the moment...something about that image didn’t fit the facts. Billy’s body had been laid out peacefully on the bed, with none of the disarray one would expect from an act of panic. Green groped slowly ahead into the confusion. If Billy’s death hadn’t been an act of self-defence but rather a carefully planned execution, Green had to throw out all his assumptions and start from scratch.

  “What if...” he began, reluctantly standing his theory on its head. “What if Devine and Patterson and Billy were right? What if Matthew Fraser really was the abuser? First he thought he’d outsmart or outrun Rebecca’s brother, so he holed up in the rooming house, where he had six days to contemplate the trap he was in. Enough time to realize he’d reached the end of the road and to plan a trap to lure Billy to his death.”

  “Lure?” Sullivan repeated dubiously.

  “Yes!” Green’s confidence grew as the theory took on shape and credibility. All the evidence in the rooming house pointed to advance planning, from the use of gasoline to the total lack of physical evidence. “This was not a clash. There was no violence in that room. Billy was dead as a doornail from something he’d ingested before the fire began. I’m guessing Fraser exploited his weakness for alcohol to slip him something lethal in his drink. And when Billy was dead, he laid him on the bed, wiped the room clean of his presence, set the fire, and slipped away. Probably intending the fire to obliterate the body’s identity entirely, so that the death would be passed over as just one more unlucky drunk.”

  Sullivan grinned with a mixture of wry admiration and skepticism. “He didn’t count on you and me.”

  “And the tattoo of Medusa.”

  Sullivan seemed to be weighing the theory dubiously. “But if you’re right, you know what you’re saying, eh? He’s not the mild-mannered school teacher out to clear his name. He’s just committed a carefully planned, cold-blooded murder.”

  Green nodded. “And Janice Tanner, agoraphobic extraordinaire, is walking into the heart of danger itself. We need to find this guy.”

  Sullivan reached for his cellphone. “I’ll put out an APB. His particulars are downtown on file.”

  While Sullivan dialled downtown, Green replayed his phone messages in search of Janice’s. What had the woman said? He listened again. ‘He’s okay, but he needs me to do something for him.’ She sounded happy, excited, thrilled to be indispensable to the man of her dreams. ‘He needs me to do something.’ Damn! Even from afar, this man was still pulling the strings and manipulating this poor woman into doing his dirty work for him.

  What could it be that Fraser himself could not do, and why not? Because he was afraid of being caught? Afraid to emerge from hiding long enough to do something—maybe procure something—for himself. As Sullivan spoke to the sergeant downtown, Green’s thoughts raced. The briefcase! It was a longshot, a wild stab in the dark, but that damn briefcase had disappeared somewhere between Fraser’s trip to the CAS and his stay at the rooming house. It had never been found. What if Fraser himself had hidden it for safekeeping in some obscure place until he needed it at a later date? Like now, in order to obliterate all records that might tie him to Billy’s death.

  Green combed through his recollections of Janice Tanner’s conversation with him. What had she mentioned about Fraser’s favourite haunts? Dow’s Lake, where he walked his dog. And the Lemieux Island Bridge, where he had his secret beach away from the crowds. Green r
eached out and grabbed Sullivan’s arm just as he was about to hang up. “Tell them to put three patrol teams out.” Catching Sullivan’s incredulous look, he waved in irritation. “Tell them Jules himself approved it. He wants a lid on this, doesn’t he? So put one team to watch Fraser’s apartment, in case Janice goes there to get what he wants. And one to search the remote corners of Dow’s Lake. They’re looking for a middleaged red-haired woman, who’s to be detained at once. Gently.”

  “I’ve already told them that.”

  “They’re also looking for a briefcase, so look in small spaces protected from rain.”

  Sullivan was all business now. No arguments, no secondguessing. “Third place?”

  “The third place is some hidden beach along the Ottawa River near the Lemieux Island Bridge. The guys will have to hunt. And fast, while there’s still light.”

  As Sullivan relayed the information, Green scoured the plan for gaps. There were dozens, but he could think of no other paths to pursue. The story had come full circle, back to Janice Tanner. They had to find this guy. The poor woman had come to Green for help, and now that very generosity of spirit was leading her straight towards possible death.

  Fifteen

  “Mike, you’re on bed rest. You can’t put in a sixteenhour day!”

  Sharon had arrived home from her fruitless search for Hannah just as Sullivan was relaying final instructions and Green was easing his sports jacket over his aching shoulders. He had taken two strong painkillers, but the effect hadn’t kicked in yet and his body was screaming in protest. He had paused long enough to listen to her brief summary of her search—no sightings of blue or green hair—before explaining his mission.

  “I have to do this, honey. I owe it to Patterson to tell him myself that I was mistaken about the body in the rooming house. His wife was nearly killed because of my mistake. Worse, it’s her son and not Matthew Fraser who died in that fire, and eventually he’s going to have to tell her.” He bent gingerly to tie his shoes. “And on top of that, Hannah’s with him.”