“At least take Sullivan with you in case you faint.”
He shook his head. How could he explain that this was his responsibility, and his alone? Women believed in team work and mutual support. Men knew that sometimes honour demanded that they go it alone.
On the drive into town, he rested his head against the back seat of the taxi and pondered the paradox of Matthew Fraser. Devine had thought from the beginning that he was a chameleon, a master manipulator who lulled people into a false sense of trust, who played the wronged and traumatized so convincingly that over half the staff at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital had been duped by him. A mildmannered young man who had lured a wild, needy little girl into repeated acts of sexual gratification, then lured her angry, street-hardened brother to his unwitting death. Green clenched his fists at the thought of how close he himself had come to falling for the victim act. He wanted to lay his hands on the man, get him under the interrogation lights, to see for himself the colour of his spots.
Patterson’s silver Audi shone in the afternoon sun when the taxi pulled into the drive, but there was no answer when Green rang the bell. He hesitated, hating the mission he’d come to fulfill, then reluctantly pressed the bell again. This time Patterson himself opened the door, dressed in shorts and a tank top soaked with sweat. His cellphone was wedged between his shoulder and ear, and his hands fumbled with his wallet. At the sight of Green, his jaw dropped and the cellphone clattered to the floor. Rage purpled his face, and he slammed the door without a word.
Patiently Green rang again. And again. Finally, Patterson opened the door and eyed him coldly. “Do I have to call a Justice of the Peace for an injunction?”
“I have important news for you.”
Patterson didn’t reply. Merely stood in the centre of the doorway, his feet apart and shoulders squared. His dark hair was glued in sweaty locks to his brow, and his face was flushed with exertion. Working off the tension, Green suspected and decided to cut the preamble.
“We have a probable identification of the body in the Vanier fire. Not Matthew Fraser as I’d believed, but unfortunately your stepson Billy Whelan.”
Patterson’s face turned ashen beneath the sheen of sweat. Involuntarily, he gripped the door jamb for support. “Good God.”
“I’m truly sorry, Mr. Patterson. We’ll need the name of his dentist to confirm the ID . Can we go inside?”
Patterson didn’t budge. Instead, he took two deep breaths and slowly drew himself up. “The dentist’s name is John Carson. Now you’ve got what you need, Green, so get the hell off my porch.”
“I know it’s a difficult time, but I’d like to ask you some questions about your stepson. About his habits, his associates—”
“Send your sergeant. I’ll speak to him.” Patterson moved to close the door.
Green felt profoundly weary. He had to concentrate to stay upright. “I’m trying to help here, Mr. Patterson. To identify your stepdaughter’s abuser and—”
“No one has asked you to!”
“Like you, I’m an officer of the court. It’s my duty to investigate when I suspect a crime has been committed. Your stepson’s death—”
“By all means, investigate! You’ll find his life a sorry mess. Nothing but wasted chances, stupid choices and bad friends. One of whom no doubt had an account to settle. Billy dealt in cocaine, Inspector, but even that he wasn’t very good at. Too much time spent writing pathetic drug poems and singing in deadbeat clubs. The fool thought he was going to rival Kurt Cobain someday. Well, now he has.”
Beneath the bitter invective, Green could hear the ragged edge to Patterson’s voice. He held up a conciliatory hand. “Mr. Patterson, I am sorry for your loss and for the way events transpired yesterday. I hope your wife—”
“Fuck the apology, Green. You’ll be seeing me in court.”
Bewildered parent or not, Patterson obviously needed the fight. Green leaned on the doorframe, his body sagging as he struggled to muster a response. “I’m not sure you’ll want to do that, Quinton. I don’t remember everything about yesterday, but there were witnesses. Your wife was very drunk, and she drove by two schools on her way—”
Patterson turned livid, and Green took a step backward, expecting the door to slam in his face. But Patterson merely jabbed an accusatory finger at his chest. “We’ll see whose actions really endangered those children!”
A soft thud emanated from within, and Patterson glanced over his shoulder in alarm. Green shoved his toe in the doorway before Patterson could swing it shut.
“If that’s your stepdaughter, I have a few questions for her.”
“With her mother injured and now her brother dead? Not on your life.”
“She doesn’t know about her brother yet.”
“And that makes it acceptable in your eyes? When you’ve finished dragging her through all her ancient history, you expect me to drop the bomb of her brother’s death on her?”
“Were they close?”
“Becky doesn’t make it easy for the people who love her. One by one she’s turned on all of us. But Billy was her rock, and God knows how she’ll react.”
“Quinton.” Green sensed his patience fraying. “Just let me in to talk to her.”
“She’s not here.”
“But I heard someone—” Patterson shoved Green back, stepped out the door and closed it behind him. Outside on the stone porch, he folded his arms across his chest like a brick wall.
“Not that it’s any of your damn business, Green, but my wife is inside with a nurse. Thanks to you, she was too frightened to stay in the hospital. Any other misperceptions you’d like me to clear up?”
Green controlled his temper with an effort. He didn’t need a pissing contest with this man; he needed to locate Hannah. To extract her from the maelstrom of this toxic family. He hadn’t seen her in sixteen years, and it hit him full force how much he wanted her first impression of him to be happy. He forced himself to sound humble.
“I’m glad your wife’s home. I don’t mean to be difficult, but I’m trying to find my daughter, and I understand she was with you.”
A smirk stole into the corners of Patterson’s mouth. Still he stared Green down for a moment longer, as if enjoying his discomfort. “To hear your daughter talk, she shares my exalted opinion of you. She and Becky had quite the contest cataloguing your flaws.”
Green’s heart sank. Until now, Hannah would have known him only through the distorted lens of her mother’s views, which paled next to the rancour Rebecca had expressed in her email.
“Where is she, Quinton?”
“I have no intention of telling you, even if I knew. Let’s just say I wouldn’t count on seeing her any time soon.”
“Patterson, where the hell is she!”
“Anywhere? Everywhere?” Patterson’s smirk broadened. “When Becky gets in these out-of-control moods, she likes to move around, stay unpredictable. They’re wherever she can find—or buy—the wildest ride, I imagine.”
Green fought the fear that rose in his throat. Hannah had survived Hastings Street. She’d survived drug busts and loitering sweeps in downtown Vancouver. Surely she knew how to survive Ottawa. Trying to look casual, he took out his card and scribbled his phone number on the back. “If you see them, could you please give this to my daughter?”
Patterson took the card and flipped it over in his fingers with disdain. For a moment, Green feared he was going to toss it to the ground, but instead he shrugged. “Welcome to the world of heartbreak, Inspector.”
* * *
An hour later, Green lay prostrate on his living room sofa, hazy from the pain killers but unable to rest. A bowl of chicken soup sat half-eaten on the coffee table at his side, and the familiar chatter of Tony and Sharon in the kitchen washed over him. His body was limp with fatigue, but his mind spun in unrelenting loops.
Rationally, he tried to reassure himself that Hannah and Rebecca were simply two teenage girls out on the town, in no danger from Matthew
Fraser. Why should they be? If Matthew Fraser hadn’t sought revenge on Rebecca ten years ago when she’d pointed the finger at him, why would he now?
Because she’d ruined his life, Green countered with a sick feeling. And because something had happened to tip the fragile equilibrium that had existed since the trial, something that had plunged Fraser into crisis and driven him to increasingly desperate ends. Green felt as if he were grappling with disparate pieces of the picture that tumbled into new patterns every time he looked at them.
He had no idea what Billy had been up to when he’d met his death at Fraser’s hand, but Billy and Rebecca were brother and sister. What if she’d been in on it too? What if Fraser, in his paranoid panic, decided she was a threat too? Where were they, where was Janice Tanner, and why the hell didn’t Brian call! Abandoning his attempt at rest, Green dragged himself upstairs to his computer. Instead of cursing his impotence, he’d try a little detective work of his own, to see what kind of man this Billy Whelan was.
Once he’d connected to the internet, he did a Google search of William and Billy Whelan, garnering over eight hundred hits which were predominantly Irish in flavour. He tried various music keywords to narrow the search and scrolled through a number of hits related to fiddle music and Irish Ceilidhs before his eye caught a rock band named Eros and The River Styx. It was a long shot, but a guy with a Medusa tattooed on his groin might be into Greek mythology.
He clicked on the link and found himself looking at a skeletal figure cloaked in black and silhouetted against a murky river. “Cross if you Dare” pulsed below in blood red letters. Intrigued, Green clicked to enter and waited as images of fire, snakes and darkness began to unfold on the screen. “You have entered the realm of Eros and The River Styx” announced a new banner in jagged black font. In the centre of the screen, a three-headed dog snarled out at him with red eyes and dripping fangs. Behind the creature, mists swirled over a river. The effect would have been laughable had Green been in a laughing mood, but if this was Billy Whelan’s rock band, Green was not reassured by his taste for destruction and death.
A choice of links popped up on the sidebar. Green chose “Who are we”, and the picture changed to a group of decidedly twenty-first century punks complete with spiky hair, chains and black leather jackets. They posed with guitars in a semi-circle around a slender young man clutching a microphone in outstretched hands. His face was shadowed by a mane of black hair that fell loose below his shoulders, but Green could almost feel the sombre intensity of his stare. Unlike his back-up musicians, he was dressed from head to toe in stark black; hardly the colour of choice for the God of Love.
Below the picture was the caption describing the band’s formation and listing the band’s earthly names. Green counted across and discovered with surprise that Billy Whelan was Eros, the band’s headliner. He read the brief bio.
Eros and The River Styx grew out of the random jamming of a group of unemployed, messed up friends with not enough money in their pockets, too much time on their hands, and a message to share. “We want to build bridges,” said Billy Whelan, the lead singer and creative inspiration for the band, who writes all the music and lyrics himself. “Beneath the differences in creed, colour and dress, people across the world have the same fears and hopes. They might express it in different ways, but they want to love, to belong and to matter. At its end, life is about good and evil, love and death.”
Now there’s a profound message, Green reflected wryly, echoed throughout history by every new generation trying to make sense of the mess they inherit. A second link on the sidebar read “Catch our sound.” Green switched on the computer’s speakers and leaned back to listen. The page filled with a picture of an empty highway fading into darkness. “Destination”, the caption read. “Music and Lyrics by Eros.”
A solitary drum began a low, gentle beat which was echoed in the next bar by the bass guitar. On top of the rhythm an electric guitar began to dance an exuberant solo, melding with the drum beat to create a strangely hypnotic pulse. After a few bars, a breathless, gravelly tenor joined the guitar.
You race the road of life’s allures,
Wings on your feet, April wind in your hair,
Silk at your fingertips and laughter in your ears,
Through life’s blinding highs and golden lights,
You race the road.
Abruptly the drum beat thundered, and the bass guitar began to drive. The voice turned urgent, angry, filled with despair.
Dark temp-ta-tion
Velvet hammers pound
Des-per-a-tion
Clawing hungers hound
De-gra-da-tion
Cast upon the ground
De-so-la-tion
Blackness all around
Green listened with increasing respect. The recording was amateurish and the sound tinny, but the talent shone through. Talent snuffed out before it ever had a chance to soar. As the last bleak strains of the chorus died away, the door opened behind him and Sharon came in to slip her arms around his neck. He braced himself for a lecture, but instead she kissed the top of his head. “What’s that?”
“Rebecca Whelan’s brother had a band,” he replied. “They were heavy into Greek mythology.”
“He was talented.”
“Yes, he was.” Regret stole over him as he looked at the desolate picture on the screen before him. At the empty road stretching into the misty night. Had that been a metaphor for Billy Whelan’s life? Green pondered the sudden plunge from joy to despair in the song. The meaning of dark temptation and clawing hunger. Cocaine? Or something else.
Sharon leaned over his shoulder to tap the murky picture on the screen. “Jeeze, Mike, I wonder if he was the mistwalker. You were thinking mistwalker was a confidante or a friend of Fraser’s, but what if it’s a code name that Fraser gave to Billy, because of this picture?”
He swung around to look at her with excitement. Barely had her insight melded with his than his own vague idea crystallized, and a further piece of the puzzle tumbled into place. Eros!
Before he could speak, a thunderous barking erupted downstairs, followed by the loud insistent ringing of the bell. The moment Sharon opened the door, Brian Sullivan strode in with a glint of triumph in his eye.
“We’ve been idiots, Mike! The truth has been staring us in the face!”
* * *
An hour earlier, Brian Sullivan had stepped into Billy Whelan’s apartment, shut the door and turned to absorb first impressions. Sparse, poor and none too clean; a place to sleep rather than a home. The off-white walls bore the stains of decades of grimy fingers, covered at intervals by pencil sketches on rough newsprint scotchtaped in place. The sketches were of animals—horses galloping with manes streaming, huskies straining eagerly in the traces, spaniels racing nose to the ground. For a moment Sullivan stood in front of the horse sketch, which was so keenly drawn that even the whites of the creature’s eyes conveyed the wild joy of running. The man might not have amounted to much else, but he could sure use a pencil.
Apart from the art, the one-room studio contained nothing but a shabby brown sofa bed, a TV propped on an upturned plastic crate, a coffee table, and against one wall a dresser and a stack of books on a homemade shelf. Sullivan poked through the books. Poetry, fantasy novels, computer manuals and three big tomes on deities and mythology. On top of the dresser sat a high-end mini sound system and a pile of CD s. Sullivan recognized some of the hard-edged bands which his daughter Lizzie normally turned her nose up at, along with an entire collection of Nirvana. There’s a hero to emulate, he reflected drily, if you’re into drug popping and suicide.
The kitchen held the bare minimum of cooking utensils and the cheap, simple food of the poor—rice, pasta, canned tuna and a bag of slightly mouldy potatoes. Buried behind winter coats at the back of the closet, he discovered a laptop computer and an assortment of expensive musical equipment, including an electric guitar. Sullivan was trying to buy Lizzie a guitar for her birthday, and he kn
ew this one was twice the price of what he had in mind. Probably stolen, and now hidden from Billy’s creepier friends to prevent a repeat.
Crusted dishes emitted a rancid smell in the kitchen sink, and stained jockey shorts and T -shirts littered the floor. Sullivan did a quick search which turned up no cache of drugs or telltale accounts book. If Billy still had criminal connections, there was no evidence of it so far. But hidden under the stack of books on the makeshift shelf, he finally found a day book and three well-worn notebooks filled with poetry. A cursory examination of the day book revealed that Billy’s appointments had been pretty sparse in the months before his death, but most were in initials or shorthand. Which could mean anything, but to Sullivan’s suspicious cop mind, it suggested codes. The initials of buyers, perhaps?
He slipped the agenda book into an evidence bag for the drug squad, and as an afterthought put the poetry notebooks into a second bag for Green, who, with his university degrees, might be able to read something into the symbolism. For himself, Sullivan preferred the tangible fruits of old-fashioned evidence and real live witnesses.
He slipped back out the door, hoping to have more luck with the alleged girlfriend next door. But as he approached, he could hear a child crying even through the cinder block walls. It sounded like a full-blown preschooler’s temper tantrum, and he hesitated before he knocked, wondering if he should come back later. Tiffany Brown was unlikely to be in much of a mood to answer his questions even if she could hear them, and he needed all the answers he could get. As he stood outside her door debating what to do, he heard shrill swearing within, and the crying stopped abruptly. He gave the neighbour an extra minute to restore her calm, then knocked.
Tiffany Brown was not surprised to see him nor to learn that Billy Whelan was dead.
“Does that mean I never get my cheque back?” she demanded. Black mascara smudged her cheeks, and her hair hung in straw-like clumps over her eyes. But beneath the make-up, she looked barely older than Lizzie, and her halter top hung over a flat, bony chest. In the background, her little girl sat on the floor, engrossed in TV and eating a box of Oreos.
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