Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  While Sullivan discussed the case with the Criminal Intelligence Unit, Green sat down on the curb and watched with weary curiosity as the two uniformed constables blundered around inside the shell of the old stone house. They emerged a few moments later, shaking their heads. Green frowned to himself. The house itself was too obvious. Fraser was an intelligent, methodical man. He would have approached the question of concealment logically. He would have looked for a place most people wouldn’t even know existed, a place where the briefcase would be protected from the rain and from the dampness of the earth. If the building had once been a pump house, presumably it had a cavity underground to house the pump and the pipes which ran from the river. This underground chamber might have remained untouched by the fire and would have had some means of access from either outside or inside the house. A hidden door, perhaps, or a hatch barely discernible on the floor.

  Green scrambled down the embankment through the thick grass. Already the sun was sinking low in the western sky, shooting flames of colour across the river but plunging the stone ruins into deep shadow. He stepped through the hole in the chain link fence and began to pick his way through the tall grass and scrub that surrounded the walls. He could see that long ago the house must have been breathtaking. Built of rough-cut grey limestone, it perched on the shoreline with the remnants of its front porch facing directly down the river to the majestic Gothic spires of Parliament Hill.

  First he inched his way around the exterior foundation, probing for signs of a hatch or a depression in the ground which might be stairs. Nothing. He stepped through the crumbling doorway into the interior, ducking under charred beams where the ceiling had fallen in and skirting the young trees that were taking root within. Perhaps I’m wrong, he thought. What do I know about pump houses?

  He stood stock still in the centre and surveyed the interior inch by inch, using his policeman’s eye to detect the least sign of something that didn’t fit. Finally, almost lost in the deep shadows of the back wall, he saw something. A very faint line, like a path worn through the grass to a point near the wall. The grass was flattened. Not trampled by the young officers who had thrashed around in here, but eroded more subtly by repeated footsteps over time. Where the path reached the barbed wire fence, a small opening had been cut in the wire close to the ground.

  Conscious of the rapidly failing light, he hurried over to inspect the base of the stone wall. The ground felt solid beneath his feet. No cellar or hidden chamber under there, he thought, but something about the stones in the wall looked odd. The joints were ragged and poorly aligned. He pushed a stone and felt it shift. He flinched, suddenly fearful that the entire wall and the remaining roof timbers would crash down on him. But nothing happened. He pushed again, and dislodged the stone enough to see there was a cavity behind. Probably at one time a storage bin of some kind.

  Excited, he pulled harder until he yanked the entire stone out. Hoping there were no furry, sharp toothed creatures who would object to his intrusion, he pulled on nitrile gloves and slipped his hand cautiously into the hole to grope around. Almost immediately his fingers struck something soft and smooth. He explored its contours. Flat and square-edged, just like a briefcase!

  Casting caution aside, he plunged both hands inside and struggled until he was able to lift the object up and draw it out through the hole. A battered, well-worn, brown leather briefcase, secured with a small lock.

  Green carried it outside and scrambled up the hillside, his fatigue forgotten. Settling in the back seat of the Taurus, he broke open the case. As Bleustein had said, it was crammed with notes, clippings and articles, all meticulously highlighted in yellow and covered in scribbled notes. Pedophilia, incest, family systems theory, the pact of silence...all of which would take hours to sift through. In a separate pouch he found a sheaf of printed emails, most sent over the past two months between someone called “seeker” and the other “mistwalker”. He frowned in surprise. Had Fraser actually been communicating with Billy? He scanned the emails excitedly. The messages were cryptic and full of code words, but rather than containing threats and warnings, they suggested collusion on a secret quest.

  Gf found...3 girls...JP 606...M can’t know!

  It looked as if Fraser had been communicating with mistwalker about the success of his search. But if Billy was mistwalker, that didn’t make any sense unless Fraser hadn’t known until too late that Billy was the very villain he was after. That would certainly explain his sudden panic and his flight into hiding, Green thought excitedly, flipping through the pages for more clues. At the bottom of one of the emails was a note in the same scribbled hand. She’s friend, not foe. Remember that.

  The door jerked open, and Sullivan stuck his head in. “There you are! They’ve just taken the body out. They’re waiting for you.”

  Green started and returned to the present with reluctance. His mind reeled. He knew the contents of the briefcase were crucial to the Fraser case, but to even know what case they were dealing with, he had to look at the body.

  He gestured to the pages he had strewn over the back seat. “Take a look at that stuff while I’m gone, will you? See if it tells us anything.” Then he took a deep breath, steadied himself against the side of the car and set off down the bike path toward the bay.

  The huge, discoloured mound of flesh was splayed on a yellow plastic sheet beside the recovery van. Water oozed from its various wounds and orifices. Cunningham and the reluctant coroner were bent over examining it minutely, holding masks to their faces. Cunningham’s new sidekick was fifty feet away, sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. Green sympathized; no doubt the kid was rethinking his latest career move. Green was tempted to rethink his own decision to examine the body, but just as he was about to retreat, Cunningham saw him. With a weak smile, Green approached.

  “What have you got?”

  “Male, medium height, five-ten or so. Weight—who knows? Skin colour ditto, although I’m guessing white, because there’s some hair left on his head that’s brown and long.” Cunningham was moving carefully around the body and pointing things out as he spoke. “The guy was wearing a tie and what looks like it might have been a grey suit—one of your higher class mob affiliates, maybe?”

  Grey suit, medium height, long, brown hair... Green stared at the body in bewilderment. One man fit the description perfectly, a man last seen wearing a grey suit and tie on his way to a meeting with the CAS eleven days ago. Yet how could Matthew Fraser have died long before Billy Whelan ended up dead in his rooming house?

  The pieces tumbled around in his mind as he searched for a new theory to contain them. What if Billy Whelan had killed Matthew Fraser the very day he’d set off to see the CAS , long before Janice Tanner ever reported him missing? Billy must have been desperate once he realized Fraser was about to reveal the truth. Perhaps he’d been following Fraser for days, and when he saw him going to the CAS with a briefcase, he realized he had to act. So he followed Fraser back to his apartment that afternoon and knocked on the door, and for some unfathomable reason no one will ever know, Fraser let him in. Then Fraser either fled or was forced to this secluded river hideaway, maybe hoping Billy would spare him if he handed over the briefcase. But once here, and knowing his secret would never be safe unless Fraser was dead, Billy killed him and threw him off the bridge.

  Poor, stupid Billy. He hadn’t found the briefcase after all, and in the end he too had ended up dead. Who had killed him? Had his own criminal past finally caught up with him, leading him afoul of the wrong people?

  Green pondered the explanation with dissatisfaction, for there was one too many murders for comfort. It made sense that when Billy had discovered Fraser was about to expose him, he had killed him. However, it was too damn convenient that someone—perhaps a Hell’s Angels’ enforcer—had stepped up to the plate to burn Billy to a crisp just a few days later. In Fraser’s rooming house, no less! Random coincidence aside, Green sensed a loose thread dangling just out of reach in his mind,
but it eluded his weary grasp. Later, when he’d slept and had a chance to go through the briefcase, perhaps he’d make more sense of it. He was dizzy with fatigue, and a dull ache had settled behind his eyes. He could see the Ident team erecting lights along the shore to help them with their search. Every minuscule cigarette butt would be bagged and tagged, every footprint cast. Up on the bridge, the second Ident team was setting up to examine the railing for prints. A long shot, perhaps, but hopefully enough to explain the mystery if anything were found.

  He walked back along the bike path towards the car, where Sullivan was just wrapping up another conversation with Criminal Intelligence. Wearily, Green filled him in on his halfbaked biker gang theory, which Sullivan embraced with few of Green’s doubts.

  “Well, you were at the meeting,” Sullivan said. “You know the biker gangs are stepping up their operations from Montreal. They’re trying to hook up with the local clubs, but they’re also flexing their muscles to make sure the locals know what happens if they don’t play ball. My guess is if Billy was trying to retire, he was a liability. He had entries in his day book that Criminal Intelligence will be salivating over.”

  Green opened the passenger door of the Taurus, longing to sit down, shut his eyes and do nothing for ten whole minutes. His eyes fell on the briefcase in the back. He looked at it blankly a moment, bothered by that elusive loose thread. Something did not fit. Then finally his sluggish mind connected. Janice!

  “Wait a minute!” He jerked upright again. “If Fraser’s been dead since the week before last, and Billy’s been dead since Tuesday, who the hell called Janice this morning to ask her to go get the briefcase?”

  “Do you know for sure it was the briefcase?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Her exact words were ‘Fraser wants me to get something for him’. But that was obviously a lie or at least an untruth, since Fraser was already fish bait.”

  “Do we know for sure that someone did call her?”

  Green nodded. “Another woman at the shelter took the call. Couldn’t identify the voice as male or female, but said Janice seemed definitely happy to hear from them. Someone was either posing as Fraser or claiming to call on his behalf.”

  Sullivan propped himself against the police car and stretched out his long legs with a thoughtful air. “Strange. Those emails you asked me to look at? Looks like this mistwalker character was helping Fraser with his inquiries. Helped him find the room in Vanier too.”

  Green leaned on the roof of the car. If mistwalker wasn’t Billy, who was it? ‘Friend, not foe...’ Was it someone who pretended to be a friend, but who’d been after the briefcase all along? Green rested his chin in his hands, letting the breeze off the water ruffle his hair. God, he was tired. “Well, whoever it is, it looks like they were playing both sides of the fence. Although I’m damned if I can think why.”

  “Seems pretty far-fetched, Green. You already have Fraser out to implicate Whelan, and Whelan knocking off Fraser, and Hells Angels locals torching Billy, and now you want to drag in...who?”

  Green turned the question over and over in his mind, sensing the futility of it. Until a vague, preposterous idea dawned. She’s friend, not foe. Remember that.

  She...

  Maybe Fraser had it all wrong. Maybe danger had lurked where he hadn’t expected it at all. As Sherlock Holmes said, once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be true.

  “Unless...” he said. “Unless Janice made the whole thing up—made up being followed, the attempted break-in at her house, the phone call this morning—to create a diversion. To make it look as if Fraser was still alive.”

  “Why?”

  “To divert suspicion from the fact she killed him herself.”

  Sullivan cast him a sidelong glance of such incredulity that Green doubted the soundness of his own mind. Had his concussion finally scrambled his brain?

  “Why the fuck would she do that?” Sullivan said.

  Green didn’t answer. He had no idea. Not until he’d read through all the emails himself, dissected the rest of the material, and done some independent background research on Janice. At the moment he knew almost nothing about her beyond what she’d told him herself. “Do me a favour,” he said. “Check if any of the surveillance teams have spotted her.”

  While Sullivan put in the calls, Green stared into the gathering dusk, his eyes scanning the cluster of bystanders who stood in the road, forming a tight circle around a female news reporter he recognized from the local news channel. Camera lights were trained on her, and off to the side sat the TV channel’s van with a roof satellite for a live feed. Green groaned. Soon the reporter would be looking for a sound byte from the police, and he had barely a coherent thought in his head. Why did the public have such a thirst for the macabre? Pressing close to the reporter so they could hear, the solemn crowd was caught in the strobe lighting of the police cars.

  He was so distracted that he almost missed the other woman and had to do a double take. On first glance, he caught only a brief shimmer of red in the panning TV lights. On second glance, a tall, angular redhead hovering on the fringe of the crowd, her face frozen with horror as she strained to hear. Just as Green recognized her, she suddenly turned and thrust her way out.

  Grabbing Sullivan’s arm, Green pointed and ducked into the shadow of the trees so that she wouldn’t see his approach. Without question, Sullivan followed. Crouching low, they ran towards the crowd, elbowed their way through and picked up pursuit. The woman glanced back, caught sight of them, and began running straight down the middle of the darkened Parkway. Their shouts only made her run faster. As they gained, she seemed to panic and veered off the road onto the grassy verge towards the neighbouring residential streets. Green felt himself flagging, but she was no match for Sullivan, who caught up with her halfway across the grass. When he touched her arm, she shrieked, tripped and fell, flinging her arms over head in supplication as she landed. She thrashed around on the ground, wailing.

  “Janice, Janice,” Green gasped when he caught up. “It’s Inspector Green. Stop, we won’t hurt you.”

  She took her arms from her face and peered at him. “Inspector Green! Thank God. I was afraid you...” She began to hyperventilate, her eyes white with fear. Not a guilty woman running from capture, he realized, but an innocent one seized by terror. What was it Sharon had said about her? That she sees danger in every shadow? He gripped her hands.

  “Janice, what’s going on?”

  “I just heard on the news...they found a body...I was afraid it was...” She gasped and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Is it Matt?”

  Green hesitated. “We don’t know.”

  “I tried so hard. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t think where it was! I looked everywhere, and then I remembered this place...”

  “Janice, I don’t get it. Help who?”

  “Matt!”

  “You saw Matt?”

  “Not, not him. His friend. He’s in hiding, and he asked her to call me.”

  “What friend?”

  “The one who called me! When we met at the lake this morning, she said Matt said I’d know where it was—”

  “Where what is?”

  “The briefcase! I’m supposed to bring it to the Stone Head.” She was beginning to get agitated, as if he were being particularly dense. In truth, he felt it. The Stone Head was a cutting edge bar on the fringe of the Byward Market, hardly the place favoured by an over-thirty, very unhip recluse.

  “Janice, what is this friend’s name?” Sullivan broke in, ever practical and calm.

  “I don’t know. Not the type of friend I’d expect. She was very young and fashionable. Pierced everywhere. Crazy hair.”

  Green’s mouth went dry. “Crazy how?”

  “She looked like a large green floor mop.”

  Seventeen

  Sullivan careened the Taurus around the corner on two wheels and accelerated up the Parkway towards downtown. With both hand
s glued to the wheel, he radiated an intensely focussed calm. Beside him, Green was much less calm as he yelled into the radio.

  “No visible presence,” he repeated. “We need to catch her unawares, not spook her. Just give me two cars on the street covering the exits and a team outside the club to await my orders.”

  Even as he issued orders, Green’s thoughts scrambled to make sense of this new twist. Was it Rebecca with whom Fraser was communicating? Rebecca who was helping him with his quest? Was she mistwalker? But that didn’t make any sense. If she wanted to help Fraser nail her molester, why wouldn’t she simply tell the truth?

  What was it Quinton Patterson had said earlier? That Rebecca was a little out of control? How out of control? Enough to have invited her brother to the rooming house for a drink, slipped him a drug and then calmly set his lifeless body afire? As payback? After all these years of simmering, unfocussed rage, was it payback for her robbed childhood? Or for a more recent crime of betrayal? Patterson said she was finally showing signs of healing. Was that because she was finding peace within herself, or because she had finally figured out a way to right the wrong?

  So many questions, but Green couldn’t concentrate on any of them. Not now. Only two questions mattered. How deadly was she? And with Hannah in tow, what was she planning next?

  On a Saturday evening in June, the Market of old Bytown was alive with people, and its narrow streets were clogged with cars, most circling the blocks in search of parking. They fought with spirited pedestrians for supremacy of the streets. Horns punctuated the cacophony of music issuing from the cafés and shops along the way.