“I make his food,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s better for him.”
She put the little pucks into a bowl and stuck the bowl in the microwave. Hazel’s phone buzzed on her hip but only once and then it stopped. When Colleen’s back was turned to get the food, she quickly unhooked it to see if she’d missed a call. But it was a text message from Wingate: IS HE ALIVE? … She put the phone away. Janice Brennan was staring at her. “Was that the hospital?”
“No … no, something else. I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.” She moved to the other side of the counter, dismissing PC Quinn with a look, and Mrs. Brennan began to feed the squirming child. “Colleen … you said the girl wanted something from your husband. Did she say what it was?”
“No. Terry said he didn’t have it and the girl said she knew he didn’t have it, but then … then she – ” She mechanically slotted the spoon into the baby’s open mouth, slipping in little loads of what Hazel thought was probably peas and chicken. She remembered briefly the pleasure of sating a baby’s hunger, how easy it was to know what they needed. “You think Terry was in trouble?”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Did he have debts? Did he have any … habits that were unusual?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” The woman was keeping her mind focused on the baby, but she was in shock. She held the spoon too far from the baby, and he, in turn, was watching her very closely. Finally, she put the spoon in his mouth.
Hazel asked her: “Can you think of any reason a strange girl would come into your house and –”
Suddenly, the other woman dropped the baby’s bowl and spoon onto the countertop and gripped its edge, as if to stop herself from spinning out into space. The baby caught its breath, his hands shooting up in front of him, motionless. Then he opened his mouth and an unholy, piercing scream came out of him.
“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know any fucking thing at all! Okay?” She breathed willfully, trying to regain control. The baby had lapsed into the silent part of a deep, terrified infant squall, the silence that presages the heartsick-making wail that follows. They both waited it out, and Mrs. Brennan took the baby out of his chair and held him. “I don’t want to know who my husband is right now. If he’s a low-life, lying, cheating, sleazeball, it can wait. I just want to know what’s happening to him.”
“All right,” said Hazel, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m going to call the hospital in one minute. I, I was told the ambulance chopper will be putting down” – she looked at her watch in a sort of vaudeville gesture – “right about now. I can call down in, five minutes. But anything that might help us get a jump, Mrs. Brennan, for instance, do you have any idea – any idea at all – what might have connected your husband to this Kitty? Even a hunch?”
“Well, I guess he was screwing her, wasn’t he? And she showed up looking to see how much her silence was worth to him. He was going to tell me … but then she …” Mrs. Brennan trailed off. “She cut him anyway.”
Not money, Hazel thought again. And whatever it was, the girl was still hunting it. Her phone buzzed again. Just once. She asked to use the bathroom, and once the door was closed behind her, she unhooked it and looked at the screen. It read, Patient DOA. She looked at herself in the mirror. It was fixed to the wall. She forwarded the text to Wingate.
On her way out, she pulled Quinn aside and quietly told her to check the contents of the Brennans’ medicine cabinet.
Back in her cruiser, she phoned Forbes. The young fellow was cottoning to the job. He’d rented a car for today’s stakeout, to keep his identifiability low, and simply drove back and forth along Queesik Bay Road every twenty minutes or so, stopping here and there, at different distances from the Eagle, and noting his impressions. He told her there was increasing activity as the day went on: a lot of people buzzing around, a lot of traffic. It was now a week since Henry Wiest had told his wife he was going out to pick up some filters in Mayfair and had parked there, many kilometres from where anyone would have expected him to be, and been murdered. The case had put on flesh over the intervening week, and with the stolen vehicle and Brennan’s death, she felt that certain energies were gathering. The girl, this Kitty, had come out into the open. What did it mean? Was she done? Maybe, Hazel thought disconsolately, the case was already over.
What had happened in Queesik Bay a week ago had happened among a swarm of tourists coming through the region, as they did every weekend of the summer. Perhaps Henry or Kitty had used the cover of the crowds to conduct whatever business had been between them. If so, maybe the investigation could use the same cover to discreetly track one of those taxicabs. The traffic in the countryside on a mid-August weekend could be good camouflage for an unmarked to follow a taxicab. She called Wingate to ask him what he thought of that. He said it sounded risky. “But worth it?” she asked.
“It could be. As long as you’re discreet.”
“I’m the soul –”
“Don’t even try. Just have an escape route in case anyone starts acting suspicious, okay?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“I’ll have the cell.”
——
She called Forbes in and drove her own car, the Mazda, directly to Mayfair and then tracked back up through the reserve toward the centre of the settlement. She passed the casino on her right and carried on until she reached the Eagle about six kilometres away, toward the Westmuir County town of Dublin.
When she got to the smoke shop, she parked her car exactly where Henry Wiest had, to test the universe, but also to see if the appearance of a car in that area was a signal to anyone. She stayed inside five minutes, looking alternately through the windshield into the woods and backwards in the rear-view. Her car, stopped where it was, appeared to spark no one’s interest at all, so she backed up and parked halfway between the road and the woods. She was more or less to the side of the shop now. The taxi stand was in front of the store, but both taxis were out on errands. The stand, with a lamppost beside it so it would be visible at night, was in an oil-slicked patch of gravel behind a low brick wall that enclosed an oval of grass and flowers.
She hadn’t seen any cameras around the back of the building, but there was one on an overhang that covered the long porch in the front of the shop. It had a view of the parking area she was coming out of, and she saw, as she came around the front, there was another camera above the door and pointing toward the road. None of this had been on RC Bellecourt’s report. It would have been useful to see those tapes. Why hadn’t they been collected? There were so many oversights in the reserve’s investigation that it made her furious.
She drove out to the position Forbes had taken when he’d started his surveillance on the smoke shop. It was a good spot, shielded from the road by trees, but with a clear line of sight to the Eagle. She continued to watch people file in and out of the store. It was coming up on five o’clock in the afternoon now, and she realized she could have a long wait in front of her. She had half a Tim’s club sandwich on the seat beside her, having been unable to stop herself from consuming the first half an hour earlier. With any luck, she’d see the sign she was waiting for before she got too hungry and then she’d be really grateful for it when she got to it. Fifteen minutes later, she’d eaten the other half of the sandwich and she was still hungry.
Her instinct every time she reached this juncture, when the temperature of an investigation went up beyond her comfort zone, when she knew time was flowing through her hands like water dashed from a bucket, was to push. Something seemingly immovable would have to be moved. And she had always been like this; she shared this trait with her mother, this inability to wait and see, to let things develop. She wanted to drive back to Eagle Smoke and Souvenir and lean on this Earl/Tate guy. Just come out with it. A guy died in your parking lot a week ago. Something’s going on here. Or not. But you’re going to convince me one way or the other tonight. She saw herself gripping the front of his
shirt and yanking him forward over the countertop. This aggression was a good trait to have in her line of work. But if she braced the man who seemed to be in charge in there, she might never find out who Kitty was. And she wanted to know who Kitty was.
At six in the evening, just when she was getting so hungry that she almost left, she saw a man in a quilted, shiny black windbreaker get out of his car and walk into the Eagle. Two minutes later, he left the shop and walked directly to the one taxi that was waiting at the stand. There was something about the way the man walked that struck her. She got her binoculars out to look closer. When the man got into the back seat, he passed something small and shiny to the driver, and the driver looked at it, handed it back, and made a right-hand turn out of the driveway. To the north.
She let the cab get a good three hundred metres down RR26, and then she pulled out of her hiding place and got in behind it.
] 19 [
Early evening
Hazel adjusted her speed to keep a comfortable gap between herself and the taxi. She could just make out a head in the back seat, a wiry nest of black hair. The passenger’s hand kept coming up in front of him and it took Hazel a while to realize he was pushing his glasses up on his nose. A nervous gesture.
She was tempted to pass the cab and look, but by then it was turning off the reserve road and toward Highway 41a. The 41a was one of the county’s prettiest drives: it curved east-west along the north shore of Queesik Bay on its way to Westmuir’s main artery, the 41. But before the cab got to the 41, it turned north again and followed Sideroad 1, which was a road laid down by a surveyor some hundred years ago. This sideroad, and many like it, did nothing more than divide fields into long tracts.
Sideroad 1 was straight and flat, although she was sure the curvature of the earth made it impossible to see farther than a few kilometres ahead. The taxi was driving at a leisurely pace between the deep green of the corn and soy fields, crossing the roads that ran east-west up through there, the “lines” on which the old farmhouses and homesteads had been built with the fields in front and behind. She stayed more than a kilometre behind and watched them pass: Seventeenth Line, Sixteenth Line. At the Ninth Line, the cab turned right again, heading east. This was an epic drive and she made herself fall farther back, to the point where she could no longer see the tires of the taxi. She watched it moving off east along the Ninth Line, and she reached the road herself and made the turn. In the distance, she was sure she saw another car, coming up another sideroad. Then she realized it was stationary, sitting in profile, below the Ninth Line. A long, black Mercedes. She kept up. The cab was still a few kilometres ahead of her. Before it reached the sideroad with the Mercedes parked on it, the black car pulled out and drove in front of the taxi by about fifteen hundred metres. Hazel lengthened her distance again. She passed the sideroad where the car had been waiting and, up ahead, saw it turn down another one, leading the taxi down another sideroad. The fields were lush and high here, mature soy undulating like the surface of a green sea. Less than a hundred metres below the Ninth Line, a stand of trees extended irregularly into the field behind. Judging from the narrowing serpentine of trunks, the copse occupied a dried-up creek that no one had ever cleared. It was a vertical burst of green above the swaying heads of soy. That’s where they were going. Into trees? She decided to watch the rest from a distance; she made the next left-hand turn and stopped the car. Anyone looking behind at her would conclude she was driving away on a road to the north and dismiss her as a danger. The soy wasn’t high enough to hide her, but she felt that her presence pointing the other direction wouldn’t disturb the scene. She got out of the car and stayed low as she came around the back of it. She stilled the binoculars against the bumper.
The black Mercedes had stopped near the trees and the taxi was driving past it a couple of car lengths. Then it stopped and discharged its fare, who got out on the left side of the cab, his back to Hazel. He stepped forward, but she already knew who he was. The man went to the side of the road and stepped down off the shoulder. She could only see him from the waist up. He was walking toward the trees. Then he vanished into them. Nothing happened. Both the cab and the Mercedes remained where they were. Then, a moment later, a man and a woman emerged from the woods. They walked calmly up to the road and got into the taxicab. The black car made a three-point turn and came back out to the Ninth Line. The taxi followed behind it. There was someone with long hair driving the Mercedes. He was wearing a ballcap. Hazel got back into her car and drove up to the Tenth Line. She dialled Wingate’s cell.
“Where are you?”
“I’m driving west along the Tenth Line. You’re not going to believe who I just saw.”
Constable Forbes was standing at the front counter of the detachment when a man he recognized came into the station house.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?” he asked.
“I’m refreshed.”
Forbes looked at his watch. “You’ve been gone for forty-eight hours. I thought you were taking the week off.”
Wingate lifted the counter flap and walked through. “Is she back yet?”
“She is.”
“You come along, okay?”
He knocked on Hazel’s door, and entered on “Come!” and Hazel looked up. She’d been tapping on her keyboard. “I just talked to you.”
“I know. I can’t look at the water anymore. What are we doing?”
“I’m looking up an address on the MTO site.”
“Guys?” said Forbes. “Whose address?”
“I just followed one of the taxicabs, Roland, one of the cabs you brought to my attention. It drove into the fields above Queesik Bay and let a man out in the middle of nowhere, beside a little grove of trees. You know how the forest pops up here and there in those fields?”
“Yes.”
“The cab let Jordie Dunn out. And Dunn walked into the trees and vanished.”
“Well, he lives in Kehoe Glenn, doesn’t he?”
She put her finger against her screen and began writing. “Right at the entrance to town.” She looked up at them.
“Should we inform Superintendent Greene?” Forbes asked.
“Do whatever you need to do,” she replied. “I’m out of here.”
“We’ll wait for news,” said Wingate. “You better go.”
Jordie Dunn lived in one of the two-storey apartment buildings at the entrance to Kehoe Glenn, cheap living quarters for locals, the Lorris Arms. After his nervous appearance at the station house, she’d asked around about him and discovered he was an irregularly employed handyman with no family. His connection to Wiest was as he’d said: he sometimes came along on a job or Wiest tossed him a little gig. She understood that his specialty was wiring and plumbing. Dunn had also declared bankruptcy in 2002. As far as she knew, he’d been living in the Lorris Arms since 1999, which was when he’d moved into the environs. She didn’t know where he’d come from, and an inquiry to the Ministry of Transport hadn’t come up with any addresses before Kehoe Glenn.
On her way down, Wingate had called to say they would tell Greene that they were still collecting information. News about Dunn could wait another hour or two, until she’d had a chance to talk to him. Once she got Dunn back to the station house, Greene could sit in on the update. She pulled off the road that led under the gateway at Kehoe Glenn and went around the back of the Lorris Arms. She had no idea what kind of car Dunn would be driving. It was possible, if he’d made a purchase in those trees, that he was already home. She parked and walked casually to the front of the building. His name was on the directory inside the vestibule and she buzzed his apartment. There was no answer. She buzzed again and still nothing. She went back out to the front and looked across the road. There was a dingy little coffee shop with dusty-looking windows, but there were people inside and she’d be able to see the front door of the Lorris Arms, so she crossed and ordered a coffee. It was poured for her out of a carafe with coffee she was sure had been brewed the day befo
re. It stank of rubber. She sat with it in the window and stared across the road, lifting the mug to her lips but not drinking from it.
The mug was still full an hour later, but it was cold, and Dunn had not entered his building. Her mind was travelling, gazing out over the quiet entrance to Kehoe Glenn. They had a little bit of AC in this place, but not enough to allow her to forget how hot this August was turning out to be. You could often count on a cold front in the county in August, something that finally smoothed the edge of July. July was always hot, but now August was hot, too.
It’s your old hag body, she said to herself, that no longer readily ventilates itself. The summer hasn’t changed.
But a lot of things had, actually. Driving down to the Indian reserve this week, her attention had finally been drawn to something she knew didn’t belong in the landscape, and this last time – passing it earlier – she’d really looked at it going by in her window. The town of Dublin, which you saw if you came directly into the reserve from the north, was one of the county’s prettiest little hamlets, and she hadn’t paid attention to the sign because the first time she’d passed it, she’d thought it was a billboard.
But it wasn’t. It was news. Some comfy housing corporation was about to dump a ready-made suburb here, right outside of Dublin, if not right on its edge. The sign, she had now confirmed, made the town itself sound like a selling point, it was “unspoiled country rustic.” Dublin was also going to be lucky enough to share itself with not just Tournament Acres, as this monstrosity proposed calling itself, but the golf course that would also be built here. Which, as luck would have it, would have its own hotel. On the grounds of the hotel would be the world’s biggest outdoor wave pool.
Why not an atom smasher for the old folks? It was disgusting to think of, here, off the main highway – protected, you’d have thought – from these marauding people who wanted to live in Disneylands for their money to play in. It was forty minutes from Port Dundas, and Port Dundas had a waterfall. It made her throat tighten to think of it. The cutline at the bottom of the sign had read, “It’s always your turn in Tournament Acres.”
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