“Why, Kezia?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Is there somebody else here with you?”
She shook her head rigorously, sending all those rich curls swaying. “No. Not now. But they might come back and they’re real mad at us now. Even at my mom. So you take this away and someday after I figure out how to do it, I’ll get a publisher to print the book and then I can sell it and people can use it.”
As always, her ambition, touched as it was with latent despair, moved me to want to help her in any way I could.
Which was why I tried to contact Mark Hopequist. I knew he had helped the girl in the past, and I was sure that even though he was no longer with the Youth Bureau, he’d at least have some ideas as to how she might be kept safe from the wrath of her gangster brothers.
All I managed to do was to leave him a message. Because when I called the number of the division where I thought he worked, someone else came to the phone, and that someone else told me that Mark Hopequist had left the force.
When I dared to ask why, whoever was on the other end of the phone laughed and said, “Guess it got to be too much for him. Never did like the violence in the city. Go figure. I mean what else is a cop going to see, right?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
With all that was going on, I didn’t have much time for television. Even for the news. So I had long ago lost track of the goings-on at the world affairs summit and of its aftermath.
The aftermath was still going on. The conference had been deemed an international success, even though there were people in Toronto who felt it had been an international embarrassment because of the totally over-the-top police presence that mirrored—in fact exceeded—the excesses of the previous world conference held in our city.
This time, as with the previous conference, the police presence was overwhelming, and though no innocent citizens were corralled and detained in a public street in four hours of pouring rain, there were plenty who complained that they had been treated with undue violence.
And one of those had managed to get a police officer charged with assault. I wouldn’t have even seen this on the news had I not been watching TV because I’d been ordered—not by my doctor, but by Aliana and Jeffrey—to take it easy for another week or two until my side stopped hurting.
What I saw was a man being led away from court by his lawyer. The man had his jacket over his face, so I couldn’t see who it was. But spliced into that clip was another that showed the incident in question. Two police officers were clearly beating a third man with their batons. The victim lay in a fetal position on the ground, trying only to protect his head and his face. He was making no effort to fight back or even to resist in the slightest. But the two officers were smacking him with the maximum force of their batons. The two officers were wearing protective masks, but one officer had lifted his so that his face was showing.
I saw that face fill the screen and I was shocked, though not surprised.
It was the face of Al Brownette.
I had known all along about the violence that lay so close to the surface of this man, the barely-controlled anger that expressed itself in his every movement: the cocky, jerky walk, the arms and hands never relaxed, always looking as though they could be raised with lethal force at a split-second’s notice.
But he had no motive for murder. He would have to have been completely crazy to sneak into a hospital and Taser an old man for the mere sake of doing a favor for his friend Ted. He might be violent and stupid, but he was no lunatic. In the few seconds of the video in which you could see Al being led away by his lawyer, his whole body seemed that of a man who had gotten out of trouble before and would get out of trouble this time, too.
Which is what I was thinking when my entire apartment was suddenly filled with flashing red light.
It was coming from the rear parking lot and as I got to the living room window and looked down, I could see three fire trucks pulling in. Their sirens were off. Perhaps I’d heard them in the distance, but apparently there was no need for sirens now. It didn’t sound as though the emergency was on our street, so I knew it must be down in the valley.
It was a little after six p.m. on a winter’s evening, so it was pitch dark already. If the emergency wasn’t in our building—which clearly it wasn’t—then something was desperately wrong down below.
I saw almost at once that the fire crews were setting up some sort of emergency illumination. A bright white light flooded the parking lot momentarily, then turned outward. But the light was reflected off the thick branches of the trees, which, being covered with snow, acted almost like a mirror.
Whatever was going on down there could not be lighted from above. I knew that, and I knew that the fire crews were about to learn it, too.
I had been up and down the walls of our valley in every conceivable condition of weather and of light. I knew I could get down there faster than anybody else, even in my weakened condition. I’d been hurt in the valley before, and I’d still navigated without getting lost or stranded.
I had to know what was going on, and, unwilling to waste a second, I grabbed my coat and scarf and hat and boots, and I set out.
I avoided the firemen. I didn’t want to be held back, to be told that I wouldn’t be allowed down there. In the dark and the hubbub it was easy to slide past the fire engines and to find my usual path down.
It was slippery, but because the way was so familiar, I knew which branches I could rely on to support me when my feet wouldn’t. And I managed to use the decline of the path to ease my way.
I headed for the village. I couldn’t conceive of an emergency at this end of the valley that wouldn’t involve its inhabitants.
And of course, I was right. Above me I could hear the shouting of the firemen and the sound of their loudspeakers, but I could only see their lights for a few steps of my journey. I soon entered the dark forest, made navigable by snowlight. For a while I heard nothing. Then I began to hear the voices raised in panic, the screams, the yelled instructions to “Hold on. We’re coming. We’ll get you. Don’t let go.”
I trudged through the wood for ten minutes before I could see the lights of the village through the trees. I approached slowly because of the ice that had formed everywhere that the villagers had walked over the past few days, except for the shoveled paths.
But no one was on those paths or even in the village. The lights were on but the buildings were deserted.
Carefully I followed the sound of the voices to the edge of the river.
There Jeffrey knelt by the bank as if to get as close as possible to whatever was happening on the partially frozen waters of the Don. “Hang on!” he shouted, though his voice sounded more like a wish than a command.
The other villagers surrounded him as he knelt there, their second-hand unstylish coats, their ragged scarves, their hockey-crested toques, marking them as a team, now a team struggling to save one of its own from the grip of the unforgiving ice.
Someone had fallen in. And though the river was shallow in some places, it was everywhere deep enough to drown a man, especially a man dressed in heavy winter clothes that would absorb the water immediately and add pounds to his weight. Especially a man who wore heavy winter boots, boots that would fill with water like a cup, like a jug. Especially a man who might be drunk or stoned or old or too deaf to hear what the people on the shore were shouting.
I had saved people from the ravages of the Don before. In fact, I had even once pulled Johnny Dirt away from certain death in its wily embrace.
But that had not been winter.
I tried to get closer to the water to lend a hand. But whoever had fallen in had already drifted out to where the current was moving with surprising swiftness in the middle of the stream. He was waving his arms, bobbing up and down, appearing and disappearing, shifting into and out of the weak light.
“Stand back!” Jeffrey shouted. And most of the gathered villagers did as he said, but one or two rushed forward.
“No!” They
reached toward him and tried to hold him back.
“Get away!” he yelled. “Let me go!”
The cries of the man in the water became more strangled, more desperate. And also, I couldn’t help but realize—farther away.
Without thinking about what I was doing, I pushed through the crowd on the bank and rushed toward my son. I reached out and grabbed his coat. “Jeffrey, you can’t go out there. You’ll drown. It’s too late.”
He pulled hard and got away. The shore ice crackled at his step and when he reached nearly the edge of the frozen part of the river, flat shards—wide slivers of thin ice—broke away and he was plunged into the black water.
I think I screamed then. I thought I could still hear faint cries from the distance, but I wasn’t sure.
“It’s too late, son,” I called out. “Come back. It’s useless. We’ll lose you, too.”
At my words the others on the shore began to call out to him. And it occurred to me just how high a stake they all had in his continued survival. He was their leader, their provider. I was linked to Jeffrey by the power of love. They were linked to him by the power of necessity. I’ve had a long, hard, life. Love is great. Need is greater.
The fire crew made its way down. They pulled Jeffrey out. Despite the dark and the cold and the increasing unlikelihood of finding the victim alive—or at all--in the dark recesses of the valley, they kept at it for seven hours. Until they found him and brought his body up into the village lodge, where the villagers took turns sitting with the body for fifteen hours until they took him away.
I had to go up to the apartment to get some sleep. I tried to convince my son to come up to his apartment, to spend the night with his own family, but he insisted on staying down in the village overnight. He didn’t even go up to change his clothes, but put on dry items brought to him by the villagers as he sat warming beside the fireplace in the village lodge.
“Everybody’s really upset,” he insisted. “I have to stay down here at least until the grief counsellors show up. Tootie understands. Besides, I’ll be in constant phone contact with her.”
So I left him. But I went down as soon as it got light the next morning, which wasn’t early. We were nearing the first official day of winter, and the light from the sky was not in our favor.
I found Jeffrey at his desk. I was sure he’d have a lot of forms to fill out now that he had lost one of his clients. But I was also sure that after the sleepless night of disaster that he’d spent, he was in no shape to handle paperwork now.
“Let me help you, son. There must be something I can do.”
He looked at me for a minute as if he didn’t know who I was. Then he managed to gather his wits and said, “We lost one of our oldest members—not just in age but in the length of time he spent with us.”
“What happened? How could he have fallen in? I thought you had a safety course that you gave everybody. I thought you conducted an annual safety audit.”
“This accident had nothing to do with safety,” Jeffrey said with weary resignation. “It had to do with rivalry between two men and their constant battle to be on top of the heap.”
I knew that what he meant by getting to the top was not what I meant. “You mean one-upmanship?” I offered.
Jeffrey nodded. “Always and in everything,” he sighed wearily. “What happened was pretty simple and pretty stupid. When the ice started to form on the river near here a couple of days ago, some debris was washed up and stuck in the ice. We’re all careful about litter and about throwing things into the water, but of course it happens all the time. People have found some astonishing things discarded in the Don.”
“Yes.” I remembered some of the treasures I myself had harvested over the years, jewelry, parts of machines that I had sometimes used to repair the things I used in the riverside shack that had served as my home, books I managed to dry in the sun, clothing. And photographs. As though people wanted to discard lovers and friends and family members who had betrayed them by throwing their images into the Don.
“They were fighting over this,” Jeffrey said, and he held up a cloudy plastic bag that contained what looked at first like a cell phone or a little hand-held computing device. “Apparently it had washed up near the shore and the two men were having an argument about who had seen it first, who had the right to keep it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A phone or something. Whatever it is, it hasn’t been underwater too long by the look of it. But it was frozen solid, so I’m sure it doesn’t work anymore.”
“So they were fighting over it? I hope you’re not going to tell me that one pushed the other into the river?” All I needed was another homicide case in my life.
“No, no. Nothing like that. What happened was that one man had the thing and when the other man tried to get it from him, the first man threw it as hard as he could. It landed out on the ice. There were others around and everybody was shouting for the two to just forget the piece of garbage. But the second man ran out onto the ice to retrieve it. The object stayed where it was, but the ice under the man broke free and he was thrown into the water.”
“He died for this?” Jeffrey handed me the bag. I opened it and peered in.
“I don’t know what it is,” Jeffrey admitted. “Do you think I should keep it in case there’s an investigation or something?”
I couldn’t answer him because I was stunned—no pun intended. I was pretty sure I knew what the object was.
“Jeffrey,” I said. “Those cops that were down here—not just the one who assaulted me, but the others, too. Did you ever see them drop anything or throw anything away while they were down here?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Right before the weather got cold there were so many people down here that I started to feel as if we were being invaded. There was even that kid. Like I said, we’re careful about litter down here. So if we caught anybody throwing stuff around, even a cop, somebody would probably have noticed and said something.” He thought for a moment. “But the trees are thick, even now when it’s just trunks and branches. And this is a pretty isolated part of the valley. So I guess a person could throw something away easily without being seen. Why? Do you know what this thing is?”
“Let me hang on to it for a day or two son. I’ll find out whether there’s any reason to keep it.”
“Okay.”
“Now get up to your home and get some rest.”
He didn’t budge. Not to abandon his post. Not to take the black object from me—an object that I was pretty sure was the thing I needed most in the world.
CHAPTER FORTY
I wasn’t sure what the charge would be if I got caught withholding evidence in a homicide case. I just knew I was willing to risk it, at least for a couple of days.
First thing in the morning, I called Aliana. “I need you. I’ve got to see you right away. Are you working today?”
“I’m working every day, Ellis. What’s so important?”
“I have something to show you. And I want you to come here. I don’t want to be carrying it around.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Get over here and I’ll show you the second you arrive.”
She didn’t say another word. Just clicked off. I imagined the countless times Aliana had dropped everything to pursue a hot lead.
Well this lead was hot—hot enough to get both of us in a great deal of trouble.
She showed up within the half hour, though it seemed to take much longer. “What is it? What’s wrong, Ellis? Are you ill? Is it your side?”
I shook my head and ushered her in. Before she even had a chance to take off her coat, I had seated her on the couch. I sat down beside her, and with caution, pushed the dented black object from its grimy plastic sandwich bag without touching it.
“Do know what this is?” I asked her.
She studied it as it sat on the coffee table in front of us. Then she put her glove back on. Gingerly she picked up t
he object. I could tell that her cautious handling of the object was not from squeamishness but because she already understood that this was something that didn’t belong here, didn’t belong with us.
“How did you find this?”
I told her the story of the partially frozen river. I told her that cops had been coming and going down there for months. I told her that Mark Hopequist had quit the force. And I reminded her of two things: that the pathologist had suspected a Taser wound on the body of the Juicer. And that Mark had talked about Tasers with Kezia.
“Didn’t it strike you as odd that he would tell a little girl about a lethal weapon?” I asked. “Granted she’s an exceptionally bright and curious girl….”
“To tell the truth, Ellis, I didn’t believe her.”
“You didn’t believe Mark told her about Tasers?”
“I didn’t believe he told her anything. I thought she was telling us a tale to impress us. It didn’t ring true and I didn’t think it could teach us anything.”
She looked at me then with a look of what, for lack of a better term, I might have called “self-surprise,” as if she had uncharacteristically failed to note some essential fact that could make or break the piece she was working on.
“I can’t blame you for thinking that, Aliana. The story didn’t convince me, either. But now that I reflect on the matter, why would the idea of a Taser randomly occur to a kid—even a curious and clever one?”
“We still don’t know whether she’s telling the truth. And even if she is, so what? What does it prove?”
“It connects Mark to the weapon.”
“Only in a very weak way.”
“So we need more.”
She turned the object over in her long fingers. Then she held it to her face to take a closer look. Both of us were well aware that any carelessness on our part might be damaging the evidentiary value of the thing, and as a retired judge, I should have been especially sensitive to this truth.
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