Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  * * *

  Dawn was washing the hospital grounds in pale light when Sullivan dropped by on his way home from the station. Green had spent the last few hours on a vinyl cushioned bench, listening to Quinton on the pay phone calling in favours and mustering his defences for the battle ahead. Psychiatrists, social workers, crown attorneys, even Josh Bleustein were rounded up, all before his daughter was even off the critical list. Green let the sounds and smells of the ER flow over him and was just drifting into a fitful sleep when Sullivan arrived with two cups of fresh Tim Hortons coffee and a grim update. After all the paperwork and official briefings were wrapped up, he had settled down to examine the contents of the briefcase Matthew Fraser had been so desperate to hide.

  As Green had surmised, Fraser had been trying for years to piece together enough evidence to identify Rebecca’s molester and to clear his own name beyond a doubt. He had contacted a couple of Rebecca’s old classmates by email, and suddenly two months earlier Rebecca herself, using the code name mistwalker, sent him an email asking to meet. They had met on a secluded bench at Dow’s Lake, where she told him she had been trying to locate him for over a year because she wanted to apologize. During the past two years, she’d finally been facing her past and looking for a way to set things right. She’d not been confused, she’d not been too young to understand or remember; she had outright lied, because with the police and the CAS all demanding answers, she needed to think of someone else to blame, and his was the first name to come to her lips. As a little girl, she’d never thought her lie would suck them all into the vortex of the legal system. She’d expected Fraser would get sent to the principal’s office, and her mother would fuss over her more closely.

  In that first meeting, Fraser had asked her if she’d be willing to go to the police and the Children’s Aid to clear his name. He told her he’d learned through research that most pedophiles didn’t stop by themselves, and that she could help right the wrong by stopping her abuser from victimizing other little girls. She said that she wanted Billy to pay for what he’d done and that she would help Fraser every step of the way, but that he would have to build the case without her testimony. She had sent him to see Billy’s former girlfriends and warned him of Billy’s gang ties. In the end, it was she who warned him Billy was on to him, and helped him pick the rooming house where he could be safe.

  Green tried to imagine her fear when she discovered Fraser had never checked into the rooming house. Her dawning realization over the ensuing few days that Billy must have gotten to him. Her rage and utter despair that justice had been snatched yet again from her grasp.

  “No wonder she took things into her own hands,” he said. “What other hands did she have?”

  Sullivan sat picking fretfully at his coffee cup and twisting it in his large, rough hands. “There is one other thing, Mike. Don’t know if this is the right time. Or if I should tell you at all. When the allegations first came out, Anne Patterson apparently asked the school psychologist to change her story.”

  Green grunted. “Small wonder. Anne knew it wasn’t true. But that’s the psychologist’s problem, not ours.”

  “The thing is, the psychologist told Devine. And Devine never put it in the record.”

  Green rested his head wearily back against the wall. “Fuck.”

  “If the Crown had known, or the rest of the team had known, they might have looked further.”

  “Might have. But might not have. There was a real lynching mentality going on back then. Someone had to pay, and Fraser was the man in their sights.”

  “But we might have looked further. I mean us—the cops on the ground, who don’t give a fuck about lawyers and press.”

  “A couple of cops even quit the force when he got off, Brian. That’s how detached they were.”

  “Okay.” Sullivan squinted at the floor. “So what are you going to do about Devine?”

  Green hadn’t the least idea. All he knew for sure was that he wasn’t going to deal with it now. Once he knew Hannah was safe, once the crises were over and his family back to normal, once he’d slept for a month, then he’d figure out what to do. It had been buried for ten years; it could stay that way a little longer, while he mustered the strength to deal with the stink if he exhumed it.

  He remembered the raw outrage on Devine’s face when she recalled the case. She had believed Fraser to be guilty, and after years of watching pedophiles waltz through the courts unscathed, she had cut a small corner to try to even the odds. She had been wrong, and that mistake had cost an innocent man his future and ultimately his life. However, ten years later, both the innocent and the guilty man were dead. Blowing the whistle would not change that nor allow history to rewrite itself, but it would ruin the career of a woman who had once been a good cop.

  After Sullivan left, Green looked at Patterson, still on the phone and in full damage control mode, and wondered what the man would do if the information ever fell into his hands. But before he’d begun to envisage even half the trouble it would cause, the entrance door opened, and Sharon came in. She looked as tired as Green felt, and with a flood of relief, he enveloped her in his arms. For a moment, he could say nothing.

  “How is she?” Sharon asked.

  He disengaged himself and drew her down beside him. “Alive. So far.”

  “That’s good, Mike.”

  “I guess.” He avoided her eyes. “Did you call Ashley?”

  She shook her head. “I figured I’d wait till we knew, one way or...no point panicking the poor woman when she’s four thousand kilometres away, and there’s nothing she can do but bite her nails.”

  He pulled her back into his arms. “Wise lady,” he managed.

  “Mike, what the hell happened?”

  He told her. When he’d finished, she shook her head with a mixture of helplessness and outrage that mirrored his own. “And to think no one did anything.”

  “Three people did something,” he corrected grimly. “They made a pact of silence, and they’ve maintained this sick lovehate triangle ever since. If I’d had my wits about me, the tattoo should have given me a clue. I think Medusa was how Billy saw his sister. A beautiful girl turned deadly.”

  “Oh!” she said in surprise. “That tattoo is not Medusa, it’s a Fury. After you left last night, I did a search on Mist Walker in Greek mythology. As two words instead of one. The Mist Walker was a name for Erinys, one of the Furies who roamed the underworld avenging wrongs that had gone unpunished, especially within the family. They had hideous faces and snakes coiled in their hair.”

  Despite his exhaustion, he felt a grim satisfaction to see the final piece of the jigsaw fall into place. He didn’t know much about classical mythology, but enough to know that the Greeks and Romans had filled their myths with rapes, incest, betrayal and endless spilling of blood. For some reason, their epic themes of heroism and villainy had captured the imagination of today’s disaffected teens in countless fantasy games and tales.

  He thought of Rebecca, the self-styled avenger in the hazy netherworld she roamed. “Billy probably knew that Rebecca called herself the mistwalker. I wonder...sounds crazy, but in this sick family, I wonder if he chose the tattoo to remind himself of what he’d done to her.”

  She made a skeptical face and reached for his coffee. “That presupposes he felt guilty about it, or even knew who the Furies were.”

  Green had no doubt of the latter. Billy had been a poet and a player of fantasy games, who saw himself as Love caught on the shores of the River of Death. He had written lyrics about dark temptation and desolation. Not only did he know who the Furies were, but what wrong Rebecca was out to avenge. “Beneath it all, Billy was an intelligent and mystical man. I think the tattoo was his private confession. Or perhaps his private admission of fear.”

  “Or maybe both. It shows how much he was still obsessed with her.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Green saw Patterson on the phone again, still marshalling the troops for the legal battles
ahead. What had Rebecca said? That Quinton relied on the law to keep evil at bay. Green knew she held no such hope. He leaned his head on Sharon’s shoulder. “Do you think she’ll ever get through this?”

  She didn’t answer right away, then sighed. “I don’t know. She would have survived the abuse, she might even have survived her mother’s betrayal and Fraser’s death. But murdering her own brother...”

  “If I hadn’t investigated—”

  She silenced him with her finger to his lips. “It wouldn’t have mattered. The damage was done.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes and contemplated all the people whom Billy had made victims two-fold. Janice, Matthew Fraser, even...

  He opened his eyes again. “Oh God, that crazy dog. Janice won’t be able to keep her in the shelter, will she?”

  Sharon shook her head and a slow smile spread across her face. “I’ve been thinking, once we get through all this stuff, we’ll have to take a serious look at Mary’s latest grand old manor. With all these additions to our family...”

  A little joy seeped into his exhaustion, but before he could muster a reply, a nurse padded quietly up behind them. “Mr. and Mrs. Green?”

  Green spun around, his spirits plunging.

  “Your daughter’s awake. You can see her now.”

  They followed the nurse through the doors and down the hall past a series of cubicles. She pulled back the curtain, then backed discreetly away as they stepped inside. Hannah lay on her back, propped up by a huge pillow. Her spiked hair was flattened into a poorly spun bird’s nest, and her face was waxen against the white sheets. But her large elfin eyes were alive and watched him without expression as he approached. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Love? Tears? A residue of shock from her close brush with death? Certainly not this flat, appraising stare.

  He hadn’t any idea what he should do or what he should say, and was just leaning forward gingerly to kiss her forehead when she pulled away.

  “Hello, Mike,” she said.

  “I’m your dad, Hannah.”

  “Fred’s my dad. You’re just a sperm.”

  He raised his eyes helplessly to look at Sharon across the bed, and he thought he saw a faint smile twitch at the edges of her lips.

  “Well,” Sharon said, “after you’ve lived with this sperm for a while, maybe a few other names will come to you.”

  Barbara Fradkin’s work as a child psychologist provides ample inspiration and insight for murder. She has an affinity for the dark side, and her short stories haunt several anthologies and magazines, including Storyteller, the New Canadian Noir and Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies.

  Mist Walker is the third in the Inspector Green series. The first, Do or Die, was published by RendezVous Press in 2000. The second, Once Upon a Time (2002), was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel.

  Barbara lives in Ottawa and is an active participant in Canada’s crime writing community. In her spare time, she is working on Green’s next case.

  The Inspector Green Mysteries

  ISBN 0-929141-78-4, $11.95 CDN, $9.95 U.S.

  264 pages, 5 1/8” x 7 1/2”

  Inspector Green is obsessed with his job, a condition which has almost ruined his marriage several times. When the biggest case of his career comes up, his relationships and many lives are put into danger. A student is found expertly stabbed in the stacks of a university library, and no one seems to know why. But as Green probes into the case, a web of jealousy and intrigue is revealed. He finds himself emboiled in a rivalry in the delicate arena of university politics. When the killer strikes again, Green realizes that he must quickly solve the case, no matter what the consequences may be.

  ISBN 0-929141-84-9, $12.95 CDN, $10.95 U.S.

  264 pages, 5 1/8” x 7 1/2”

  When an old man dies a seemingly natural death in a parking lot, only Inspector Green finds it suspicious. Why did the victim have a mysterious gash on his head? A search of his house turns up an old tool box containing a German ID card from World War II. Was the victim a Jewish camp survivor or a collaborator who had sold his own people into slavery and death? Could someone have tracked him down for revenge? The second Inspector Green novel is not only a tightly plotted mystery, but a compelling tale of unhealed emotional wounds from a time of unspeakable atrocity.

  Text © 2003 by Barbara Fradkin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Cover art: Christopher Chuckry

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative

  RendezVous Crime an imprint of Napoleon & Company Toronto, Ontario, Canada www.napoleonandcompany.com

  2nd printing 2009 Printed in Canada

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fradkin, Barbara Fraser, date—

  Mist Walker / Barbara Fradkin.

  (An Inspector Green mystery)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-894917-03-2

  I. Title. II. Series: Fradkin, Barbara Fraser, date-. Inspector Green Mystery.

  PS8561.R233M48 2003 C813’.6 C2003-902838-0

  PR9199.4.F73M48 2003