Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  He steered adroitly around the question and inquired about any known enemies or conflicts involving Billy. She shrugged.

  “He dreamed big, but he was such a loser. Probably wouldn’t have the nerve to hurt a fly. But he’s done time, and he did deal some when he needed the cash. He wasn’t big time, but he might have made enemies.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  She blew a clump of hair out of her eyes and clucked with impatience. Behind her, a kettle began to whistle on the stove, but she ignored it.

  “Well, there was this one guy creeped me right out. Showed up on my doorstep about a month ago, asking questions about Billy. Like was he a friend of mine, what was he like, did he ever have any visitors in his apartment? The guy seemed especially interested in my little girl. Gave me the creeps the way he kept looking at her.”

  “Can you describe this man?”

  “Yeah, like...mid-thirties, ordinary looking, dressed like a total geek. Brown hair long in the back like ten years ago. When I told Billy about it, he said it was probably some undercover cop.”

  Sullivan studied his notes, careful to conceal his excitement. Tiffany had just given the perfect description of Matthew Fraser.

  “But he was interested in your little girl, you say?”

  “Yeah, well, like in how Billy treated her. Which was creepy, because that’s the reason I broke up with Billy. He was no good in bed with me, couldn’t hardly get it up most of the time, but he’d wrestle with Katie, tickling like, and he’d get these humongous hard-ons. Freaked me right out.”

  Sixteen

  “I knew it!” Green crowed before Sullivan had even finished his story. “It’s so obvious! How the fuck did everyone miss it!”

  “Well, after all, he was only fourteen–”

  “Fourteen is plenty old enough, if you remember. My God, all the signs are there! Who else would she lie for?”

  “Yeah, but we weren’t the only ones to miss it, Mike. Everyone much closer to the case—Barb Devine and the CAS , the family...”

  The two men had the living room to themselves, and Green was sitting bolt upright on the sofa. Pain and adrenaline pulsed through him, scattering his thoughts. Sharon had barricaded Tony and the dog in the kitchen with her while she cleaned up dinner, and Tony’s incessant chatter washed over Green unheard as his thoughts slowly began to coalesce.

  Green marvelled at how blind they’d all been to forget that children could be not only the victims but the perpetrators of evil, and that brotherly protectiveness and love could so easily transform into sex and domination. The abuse could have been going on for years, beginning as the barely pubescent curiosity of a ten-year-old and progressing slowly to physical exploration and experimentation, and finally to full-blown sexual acts. Beginning so innocuously that perhaps at first neither of them had thought anything wrong, until Billy’s adolescent urges coerced her into acts she found scary, disgusting or even painful enough to speak out. Since there had been no vaginal penetration, Billy may even have convinced himself that his little fondlings were harmless.

  Yet now in hindsight, how clearly everything fit! Matthew Fraser had been wrongly accused from the start, a hapless target who was safer to finger than her own brother, and once Fraser had pulled himself together years later, he began his quest to find out who the guilty party was. He’d done research, analyzed court and newspaper records, and as his suspicions grew, he’d done his own questioning of Billy’s neighbours. When Tiffany tipped Billy off that Fraser was nosing around, Billy began to follow him, perhaps to frighten him or simply to find out what he knew. Fraser had compiled his case, tried to take it to his lawyer and, when that failed, to the CAS .

  But especially now that his band’s success was finally within reach, Billy would have been desperate to prevent anyone from derailing his life’s dream. Somehow he must have intercepted Fraser outside the CAS and panicked him into flight. Fearing that no one was going to believe him and that Billy was on to him, Fraser had tried to go into hiding. But Billy tracked him down to the rooming house, and in that final confrontation, with his back to the wall and desperate to protect himself, Fraser had killed him.

  Which meant they were still looking for a killer, but at least not the cold-blooded manipulator Green had feared him to be.

  “I wonder what difference this makes to the safety of Janice Tanner,” Green mused. “Matthew Fraser may not be quite the bad guy we thought he was, but this still proves he’s capable of murder when he’s desperate. And after his last experience with the justice system, he’s not likely to surrender to us without a fight. No one’s been on this guy’s side. No one. I have a very bad feeling about what this guy’s capable of when he has nowhere left to turn.”

  Sullivan fidgeted uneasily with his notebook, looking at war with himself, as if he had something to tell him, but didn’t want to.

  “What?” Green felt a twinge of alarm. “Is there news about Anne Patterson?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I’m not sure it matters, but back in the original investigation, Anne may have tried to get the abuse charges dropped, but Devine—”

  He stopped as his radio crackled faintly as his side. He turned it up to respond to his own call sign. A voice blasted over the radio, shrill with excitement, but the message was clear. The caller was part of the team conducting the search in the Lemieux Island vicinity. They had combed through all the underbrush and the abandoned house, and they’d just started along the water’s edge.

  Sullivan broke through the travel commentary impatiently. “Any sign of the Tanner woman or the briefcase?”

  “No, but—but we found a body, sir!”

  “What?”

  The officer was breathless, his young voice cracking. “We found a fucking body, half sunk just fifteen feet off the shore!”

  * * *

  Sullivan barrelled down Woodroffe Avenue through the corn fields with his red light flashing while Green hunkered down in the passenger seat, coordinating with the sergeant on the scene and calling in the police units that would be needed. The Ottawa-Gatineau area straddled the confluence of three large rivers and one canal, so recovering bodies was a well-established routine. Most of these were accidental drownings due to boating and snowmobile mishaps which often occurred many miles upstream, but the bodies were swept down by the strong current. The occasional one was a suicide leap from one of the city’s bridges. Only very rarely was it a case of foul play. Spring was the busiest time, as bodies began to warm up and rise to the surface. The section of the Ottawa River where this body had been found was deceptively fast moving, catching many a swimmer or kayaker by surprise. Green knew there was a good chance it had no relation to the Fraser case, but a knot of worry formed in his gut nonetheless.

  Sullivan’s efficient driving delivered them to the entrance of the Lemieux Island Bridge in just over half an hour, but the scene was already beginning to look like a carnival. Four cruisers with flashing lights blocked the entrance to the bridge, and yellow tape cordoned off the entire copse of woods on the east side of the bridge. There was no sign yet of the boats and divers of the Underwater Search and Recovery Unit, but the Forensic Identification van was parked on the bridge in a line of official vehicles that included the black coroner’s van. Sullivan parked his Taurus behind the others, and the two of them climbed out.

  Green scanned the surroundings to get his bearings and to form an initial impression of the terrain. The broad Ottawa River lay ahead of him, its shoreline meandering among a series of small islands, but its centre rushing deep and fast under the bridge. Along the water’s edge, sandwiched between the Parkway and the river, was a thin swath of parkland with overhanging trees and the occasional beach along the rocky shore. The sun blazed off the river, elongating the shadows of the police officers poking around in the tall grass. Crowds of joggers, cyclists and strollers on the bike path along the river had stopped to watch the drama, craning their necks past the yellow tape.


  At the Lemieux Island Bridge, the riverbank curved out to form a peninsula covered with thick woods. Near the tip of the peninsula, jarringly out of place in this wooded setting, were the crumbling remains of an old stone house, beside which the shoreline disappeared into a thick clump of trees. It was in the trees, invisible from the Parkway or the bridge, that all the activity seemed to be focussed. Green could hear the murmur of voices and the crackle of radios through the bush. Could it be Fraser’s secret beach? he wondered, as the knot of worry tightened.

  The uniformed officer who’d discovered the body was waiting for them at the curb, trying to look professional, despite the unusual brightness of his eyes and the green cast to his skin. He seemed doubly flustered to be dealing with an inspector, and he flitted from word to word as he pointed down the slope past the stone house.

  “My partner was keeping surveillance, sir, and I was working my way along the shore looking for the briefcase. There’s a fairly worn footpath along there, and at one point it dips down to this tiny beach. Really nothing more than a place for a couple of lovers, and there was some evidence of that, sir. So I stood on it to look around. Actually I was looking downstream towards the skyline. It’s amazing, you can see all the skyscrapers and the Supreme Court and the Peace Tower up on the bluff, hardly a kilometre away, and here’s this little piece of private paradise—”

  “Officer,” Sullivan nudged.

  “Sorry sir. That’s what I was thinking, and that’s when I saw this thing bobbing in the water about fifteen feet out. Well, not really bobbing, but big and puffy just under the surface. I thought it was a dead fish, but it was awful huge, so I stepped out in the water a ways, and that’s when I realized it was the body of a man.”

  “Man? You’re sure?”

  “Oh, no. I mean, you can’t tell what it was. It’s sort of green and red marble. That’s when I called my sergeant, and Sergeant Sullivan too, because it was his operation, and my partner and I secured the scene. The Ident team is down there now, taking videos. And the coroner’s there too.”

  “Who’s the Ident in charge?”

  “Sergeant Cunningham. He said not to let anyone near till he’s processed the scene.”

  Green was familiar with Cunningham’s new obsession with scene contamination. He turned to Sullivan with a grimace. “A green and red floater. I’m not in a big hurry to have a look anyway.”

  Sullivan chuckled. “Even the coroner’s probably reluctant to look at this one. Sounds like it’s been in the water a while. The good news is, it probably has nothing to do with our case.”

  Green stood in the road looking around. Despite the constant stream of cars on the Parkway, the bridge itself would normally have very little traffic, since it led nowhere but to the water purification plant on Lemieux Island, which sat in the middle of the Ottawa River. The bridge and island were closed to public access after eight in the evening, so at night the entire area would be virtually deserted. Certainly much more deserted than any of the other brightly lit and overcrowded bridges in the city. It must have been this very solitude, mere minutes from his home and from the spectacular downtown skyline, that Fraser found so soothing.

  Green’s eyes were drawn back to the stone structure at the water’s edge, which looked like the remains of an old stone homestead blackened by fire. It was surrounded by an eightfoot chain link fence, and shrubs flourished in its gutted core.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The old Hintonburg pump house,” Sullivan said. “Remember the fire about ten or fifteen years ago?”

  “And the city just left it there?” Green demanded incredulously, although he suspected that the heritage building’s fate was trussed up in a thousand miles of inter-governmental red tape which might paralyze the authorities for decades to come. His curiosity was piqued, for it looked as if the crumbling stone harboured dozens of crannies where a briefcase could be hidden. He turned back to the constable. “Did you search it?”

  “Well, no sir.” The constable looked nervous. “It has barbed wire all around it.”

  “As soon as Ident gives us the all clear, search it,” Green snapped. He began to stroll out onto the bridge, feeling the blaze of the evening sun on his face and the wind off the water in his hair. Soon the bridge reached open water, and the rush of the current filled his ears. He leaned over the edge, careful not to touch the railing, and stared down at the deep water which raced beneath him. His gaze followed the current as it roiled on downstream toward the bluff of Parliament Hill. Then he glanced towards the shore, which angled into a small bay where the coroner and the Ident team were clustered thigh deep in the water. Further downstream in the bay, he saw the flashing red of the Underwater Search and Recovery Unit van as it backed up close to the water. He imagined the men swarming out of the back and preparing their gear while they awaited the signal from the coroner and Ident. The diving suits, dinghies and nets would all be in readiness.

  Green’s eyes tracked the path of the current from the bridge to the small bay. Most of the water flowed straight downstream, but at the edges of the current, small eddies became sidetracked and drifted lazily into the bay. His pulse quickened. It was theoretically possible for someone to jump off the bridge expecting the current to sweep his body far downstream and thus delay its discovery for weeks, only to have it drift into the bay and surface several days later exactly where the Ident team was standing. Could it possibly be Fraser? Had he come to his favourite refuge for solace, only to realize that his future was over? That with the murder of Billy Whelan he had crossed the line from victim to villain, and that all hope of redemption and restitution was lost?

  Green carefully scanned the bridge railing. It was slightly rusty and worn with the scratches of normal wear and tear, but he could detect nothing suspicious to the naked eye. He called Cunningham on his radio. “Lyle, it’s Mike Green. I’m going to call another Ident team in to look at this bridge. It’s possible our floater jumped from here.”

  To his surprise, the Ident officer gave him no argument, but sounded oddly excited as he signed off. A few minutes later, Green saw him leave the water and clamber up the slope to his van. Green and Sullivan walked back along the bridge to greet him.

  “So what’s the word?” Green asked.

  “It’s an adult male, but the body’s too bloated to make any ID or even to guess at the size till we get it into the autopsy room.”

  “Any guess on how long it’s been there?”

  “Well, it’s beginning to float, so it’s got to be at least a week, but not more than two. Not too much skeletonization yet, although the fishies have been nibbling.”

  “So the coroner’s figuring one to two weeks?” Green felt relief. Whatever the tragic story of this body, it couldn’t be Fraser.

  Cunningham grinned. “Dr. Lee took the call, because nobody figured it was a suspicious death. But you know how much he hates floaters. He hasn’t taken too close a look yet, and he’s handing the PM over to MacPhail tomorrow.”

  “MacPhail?” The fact that the autopsy would be conducted by the forensic specialist rather than a regular pathologist meant something was amiss. “So you’re saying this might be a suspicious death?”

  “Might be?” Cunningham laughed, obviously enjoying his role in the drama. “Judging from the shoes the guy’s wearing, I’d say so. Standard mob-issue cement.”

  Green stared at him. “He’s wearing cement shoes?”

  “Yeah. Nice new cinder block tied to his ankles. Although whoever did the job didn’t have enough experience to do it right. Didn’t know you need a hell of a lot more cement to keep a body under water once it starts to decompose. This guy’s been bouncing along, dragging his anchor about a foot off the ground.” He shook his head in mock disgust. “Christ, you just can’t get good help any more.” He held out a computer disk. “So he’s all yours, guys. And here’s a little photo album to get you started.”

  “I think Cunningham’s been working in Ident too long,”
Sullivan remarked drily as they watched Cunningham walk back down to the shore.

  Green barely heard him as he tried to absorb the latest twist. The man had not jumped off the bridge, he’d been thrown! Right near the very spot where Fraser liked to hang out. But where the fuck did this body fit in the Fraser story? If at all.

  “Get the guys in Criminal Intelligence to check into recent enforcer activity,” he said. “Especially any new kids on the block. This killer didn’t know how to throw a body off a bridge very well either. An all-round incompetent bad guy.”

  As Green said the words, a picture came to mind of one of life’s losers, who couldn’t even make a success as a criminal, a Hell’s Angels wannabe who’d hung around on the periphery hoping to make an impression. And who had himself ended up dead barely a week later. Billy Whelan. Yet that didn’t make any sense! Why would Billy Whelan choose this particular spot to throw someone off? And equally to the point, why would he be killing anyone when he was rumoured to be trying to get out of the business so that he could move on to loftier dreams? There were probably a dozen other puppet club amateurs eager to prove their mettle to the kingpins from Montreal. Any one of them might have decided to bump off the competition. Perhaps they chose this location for the same reason Fraser loved it. Because of its seclusion.

  Green watched absently as the young constable and his partner clipped the chain-link fence and began to search the stone house for the briefcase. Briefcases, dead bodies, favourite haunts... There were just too many damn coincidences.

  “When the divers get the body out, I want to look at it,” he said suddenly.

  Sullivan swung on him, cellphone already to his ear. His mirrored sunglasses revealed nothing but above them his brows shot up. “Why?”

  “Because it’s one coincidence too many,” he replied briskly. He hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt, for after less than an hour on his feet, he was already exhausted, and he wasn’t at all sure he could manage the long night that lay ahead of them. Earlier, he’d had to lie through his teeth to Adam Jules about his health before Jules consented to his playing even a partial role in the recovery of this body, and he only hoped Jules would not show up to see for himself how Green was managing.