Cut to the Chase

by Joan Boswell

  Opposite the recreational side of the room, yet another lacrosse poster presided over the mechanics of twenty-first century living. An unpainted door resting on two beige metal file cabinets served as a desk. A laptop, printer, phone and answering machine lined up like soldiers awaiting their marching orders. The answering machine’s message light flashed.

  Hollis pressed play.

  “Your mortgage has been approved blah blah blah...” Pointless to save, but to erase would be tampering with evidence in the event there had been a crime. She pressed save and moved to the second one. “This is Boris,” a heavy Eastern European accent, one she thought that she recognized. Boris must have done a blitz on every phone number in the book. “Do not move unless you talk to Boris...”

  She stopped listening. Boris might vary his spiel, but many times before she’d received his annoying calls selling his moving company’s services.

  Number three. “It’s Monday. Where the hell are you? You’ve got a job, in case you’ve forgotten. Actually, you fucking well haven’t—you’re fired.”

  Not good news. If he’d intended to be away for an extended period, Danson would have talked to his boss.

  She moved on to the next message. “It’s Cally. Let me know if your gorgeous mother still sews her wonderful costumes. I’d like her to design one for me with no other like it in the whole wide world. Oh, and tell her we’re not in the same competitions. Call me.” Cally sounded like she drew hearts as punctuation in anything she wrote and cultivated wide-eyed innocence. Probably her stock in trade in the competitive dance world.

  Next call was a hang-up.

  Several long messages related to lacrosse and recruiting for the team. The callers, and there were three different voices, became increasingly irate when they repeated their messages and demanded that Danson return their calls. Whoever they were, they’d phoned before Candace talked to them, or they’d be aware of Danson’s absence.

  And then it was Boris again.

  No messages offered any immediately recognizable clues as to Danson’s whereabouts.

  The filing cabinet came next. The top drawer confirmed her impression that Danson was a tidy man. Financial records—paid bills, taxes, insurance, Visa and bank statements—filled the first drawer. Lacrosse schedules, contacts, equipment etc, memberships in lacrosse and alumni associations, newspaper clippings relating to lacrosse, to criminals, to the justice system, to trials—these files crowded the second drawer. Danson seemed to have recorded and saved every detail of his life.

  If a crime had been committed, the apartment would be sealed, and she wouldn’t get a second chance to burrow through his records. Hollis hoped she wouldn’t need any of this information but pulled the paper from her bag and used Danson’s printer to copy every potentially helpful file, including a chart detailing the organization of Toronto’s Russian Mafia.

  The Toronto police would do a thorough job. She’d had firsthand experience and knew how effective they were. Sometimes an unprofessional mind thought differently, approached problems in a different way. That would be her role.

  Copy, copy, copy—it took forever; almost all her paper, and the printer alerted her that the ink cartridge must be replaced. Once done she carefully replaced the files and opened the laptop. If she needed a password, she would be out of luck. No one in her circle of friends used passwords for their personal computers, but given his campaign to round up criminals, Danson might. She flicked it on.

  The intercom sounded. Candace and Elizabeth had arrived.

  Hollis buzzed them through the downstairs door and stepped out in the hall to wait for them to climb the stairs.

  “Touchdown. Mission accomplished. We have shoes,” Candace called.

  “Hi, Howis,” Elizabeth said.

  Inside the apartment’s living room, Candace donned the gloves Hollis offered. Elizabeth watched and held up her hands.

  “No gloves for you. They’re too big. They’re for Hollis and me,” Candace said.

  Elizabeth’s lower lip quivered.

  “You can watch TV,” Candace said to the little girl, who immediately plunked herself down in front of the television.

  Elizabeth held up her foot for Hollis’s inspection. “See,” she said displaying a pink running shoe with Velcro fasteners. “New.”

  “They’re gorgeous. What a lucky girl you are,” Hollis said.

  Elizabeth ripped the Velcro tab to undo the shoe. She gripped the heel, yanked the shoe off and held it up to Hollis, who accepted the gift, admired it, and handed it back.

  Elizabeth struggled to push it on, so Hollis bent down to help her. “Was it hard to track them down?” she said to Candace peering over the little girl’s shoulder.

  Candace smiled ruefully and ran both her hands through her neat bob. Hollis admired the way the hair dropped into place, the mark of great hair and a terrific cut.

  “Hard enough. Three stores, two temper tantrums—then success. Coping with toddlers is not for the faint-hearted.” She picked up the remote and flicked on the TV.

  Elizabeth ignored it. Instead she peered up at Candace. “Danson?” she said. Her nose wrinkled, and her tiny, almost invisible eyebrows drew together in a frown.

  “Not here, sweetie,” Candace said.

  Elizabeth glowered. “Lizabet want Danson,” she said.

  “I know you do. But not now. Elizabeth, this is one of your favourite shows—it’s Curious George.”

  Diverted, the little girl settled to watch the monkey’s cartoon antics.

  Candace moved closer to Hollis. “Well, what did you find?”

  “Danson’s car, wallet and keys are gone, but he left his cell phone, toothbrush, and shaving stuff. He must have expected to return quickly from wherever he went.” Hollis didn’t want to look at Candace, to witness the devastation as the ramifications of this information hit home.

  “He doesn’t go anywhere without his cell.” A long silence grew heavier by the minute. “This is bad news, isn’t it?” Candace said.

  No use denying it. “I think you should contact Missing Persons,” Hollis said gently. “If you like, I can phone Rhona Simpson, a homicide detective I know, and ask her advice.”

  Candace shuddered. “Please. Do it immediately. I have to know that Danson isn’t the unidentified man in the morgue.”

  Five

  Late that October Saturday afternoon, Rhona Simpson hunkered down at her desk. She, along with an ever-growing pool of detectives, had been assigned to unearth the killer or killers preying on men in the downtown area. The killings had begun six weeks earlier. The police weren’t any closer to solving the crimes than they had been on day one.

  Six murdered men, five identified thus far, all stabbed with a long, thin blade. One unidentified—his face pulverized and his fingertips chopped off. No one had reporting a missing loved one, at least not a man with physical characteristics that corresponded to the mystery man’s. A gangland execution—but which gang and why?

  Rhona repositioned the elastic scrunchy anchoring her dark hair away from her face and covertly studied the partner assigned to her.

  Ian Galbraith, the newest detective in homicide, zealously applied a yellow highlighter to the document in front of him. There wouldn’t be much unmarked when he finished. Single-mindedness characterized his attitude. Like most new boys, he was determined to prove himself.

  Physically, blazingly blue eyes, fair skin and black hair falling in his eyes marked him as a man with a Gaelic heritage matching his name. Tall, thin and intense, he’d launched himself into the investigation as if his position depended on it, and maybe it did.

  “What are you staring at?” Ian said.

  “Sorry, I do that when I’m thinking,” Rhona said.

  “I’m relieved. I thought I must have left half my lunch on my face,” Ian said with a small smile that revealed perfect teeth and a dimple. He returned to scrutinizing the document.

  They’d spent the morning on the street, interviewing women a
nd men on the stroll and searching for fresh clues to identify the killer. Hours later, they were cross-indexing information from the murdered men’s files, seeking a revealing, overlooked detail. For the last few minutes, they’d been reviewing information, searching for similarities in lifestyle, hangouts, diet, habits, medical conditions—factoids that linked the victims to each other and to their killer or killers.

  Rhona leaned back in her swivel chair and shifted her weight to keep from resting on her left hip. She’d enrolled in a Pilates class several weeks before, and the previous day her ego had prompted her to do a leg-lifting exercise that the instructor had cautioned was for the “more advanced” in the group. Rhona had figured that as she was only in her late thirties, she was as fit as anyone, but watching the lithe twenty-year-olds, she should have known better.

  She stretched her legs and contemplated the black tooled-leather cowboy boots chosen to coordinate with her washable black pantsuit. Aware of her foibles, she knew she wore boots almost daily not only because they were comfortable but because they gave her the added inches she craved. In the man’s world of policing, being a short First Nation woman left her triply disadvantaged, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it except wear higher heels. Enough self-examination. They had work to do.

  “Six weeks since the first murder—it’s too long,” Rhona said.

  “It is.” Ian evened the edges of the paper piled on his desk and frowned. “Do you get a sense the killer doesn’t care about his victims?”

  Rhona felt her eyebrows rise.

  “No, that didn’t come out right. What if the killer hates what his victims do but isn’t attacking them as individuals. That’s what I mean?”

  “Like the anti-abortionists who have nothing against particular doctors but kill them because of what they do?”

  “An analogous comparison. A fervent crusader maybe?”

  Analogous? Fervent? Not words commonly heard from her fellow detectives. She’d have to learn more about this new guy. “Maybe. They were all addicts.” Rhona riffled through her papers. “No victim was sexually assaulted or fought back. No skin under fingernails, no semen, nobody who’s come forward to say he saw anything—we’ll have to catch the perp in the act.” She rocked forward on her chair and winced.

  “What’s wrong?” Ian asked.

  “Pulled a muscle doing Pilates,” Rhona said. She cautiously leaned her body forward again. “These men were expendable. That doesn’t explain why they were killed.”

  “It’s the general opinion that they were involved in the drug trade?”

  Rhona shook her head. “Too obvious. These guys were peripheral—small fry.” She moved herself a fraction of an inch to the right. “They weren’t operators—maybe mules, but I doubt it. I think the killer hates drugs and those who use them. Finding the person who hates drugs enough to kill men because they were addicted—that’s who we’re searching for. Whoever that someone is, he doesn’t frighten those he kills. That’s our perp.”

  “That might explain those crimes, but I don’t see how it ties into the killing of the other man.” Ian steepled his fingers, tilted his head to one side and waited for her response.

  “In my opinion it doesn’t. The perp beat the shit out of this guy before he died. His face smashed with something heavy—a crowbar, baseball bat—who knows. His fingers chopped off. No fingerprints. Whoever killed him didn’t want him identified. We have to wonder why.”

  “No blood in the dumpster where we found him. Moved from somewhere—who knows—it’s a big city,” Ian said.

  “The killer made sure the victim would be hard, if not impossible to identify. Why hasn’t someone missed him?”

  “Obvious answers. Either he isn’t from Toronto, or those close to him don’t dare call us.” Ian swept up the pile of paper, held it aloft and shook it. “The answer is here. It would be good for our careers if we could identify the missing link.”

  Rhona’s phone rang. She listened for a moment, pushed the button to activate the speaker phone and motioned for Ian to listen. “Repeat that, please,” she said.

  “My friend’s brother is missing. She’s afraid something terrible has happened to him,” Hollis said.

  Men disappeared every day; it was the nature of the beast. However, at this particular moment, Homicide had an unidentified male murder victim.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Give me his particulars,” Rhona said.

  “I’ll put his sister, Candace Lafleur, on the line. She’ll provide the details.”

  “Detective Rhona Simpson speaking. Sorry to hear about your brother. Give me his vital statistics—name, age, height, weight, eye and hair colour, marital status, occupation, address, everything relevant. After that, tell me why you’re worried.”

  “Danson Lafleur. He’s twenty-four, single, six-foot-two, about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, blue eyes and brown hair. Danson’s a bouncer at the Starshine club, and he plays semi-professional lacrosse. He lives in an apartment on Bernard Street in the Annex.”

  “Tattoos or scars?”

  “No. He hated…” Candace paused.

  Rhona knew, as surely as if she’d been in the room with her, that Candace’s eyes had widened; she’d spoken as if her brother was dead. “My god, that was past tense. That shows how frightened I am. Anyway, he’s hated needles since he was a baby. I can’t remember any scars. He suffered the usual number of childhood falls and accidents, but none left scars.”

  Too bad. A snake twining on his bicep or a heart on his shoulder would help identify him. Today being tattooed seemed to be a rite of passage. Rhona had contemplated getting one relating to her Cree background but had rejected the idea of voluntarily suffering pain.

  Rhona said nothing about the man’s body lying unidentified in the morgue. He didn’t have identifying marks either, but comparing DNA or dental records would tell if Danson Lafleur and the man in the morgue were one and the same.

  “Why are you afraid?”

  “We always talk on Sunday nights. Always. It’s never mattered where he was or what he was doing, he always, always phoned me on Sundays. I had lunch with him two Saturdays ago, and he hasn’t contacted me since.” She paused. She probably thought that this sounded a bit odd and required an explanation. It did. Most grown men did not phone their sisters once a week.

  “I’m older than Danson and more or less brought him up. Kind of a surrogate mother. He’s never missed a Sunday night. Never. He would have phoned or e-mailed me if he could.”

  Definitely didn’t sound good, although a man might change his habits without it meaning anything more serious than a desire to alter routines.

  “Have you checked his home to see if he took clothes, suitcases, cancelled the paper or anything else to tell you he left intentionally?”

  “We’re in his apartment right now. His car, wallet and keys are gone, but his cell phone isn’t, and he didn’t take shaving stuff or toiletries.”

  “Sounds as if it’s time to report him to missing persons. Go to your nearest station and file a report. Take a recent photo. Let me speak to Hollis again.”

  “Hollis speaking.”

  “I don’t want to alarm your friend, but if Ms Lafleur has access to his apartment, ask her to pick up and bag his hairbrush or something else that will have DNA and drop it off at the desk downstairs. Also get the name of the young man’s dentist.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Pursuant to another inquiry,” Rhona said. “We’ll get back to you.”

  “How soon?”

  “When the lab work is done.”

  Ian raised an eyebrow after Rhona had placed the phone in its cradle.

  “Hollis Grant. I’ve dealt with her twice before,” Rhona explained.

  “In what capacity?”

  “When I worked in Ottawa, her husband was murdered and here, in Toronto, the stepson of one of her friends was murdered.”

  Ian exhaled a puff of breath and shook his head. “I’d s
ay you need hazard pay to associate with her.”

  Rhona nodded. “You could be right. She seems to be murder-prone. You heard what her friend said. Her brother is the right height, weight and has the same colour hair as the man in the morgue. For his family’s sake, I hope it isn’t him. But it would speed up our investigation and give us leads if we knew the victim’s identity.”

  * * *

  As Danson’s TV blared and Elizabeth sat entranced, Hollis and Candace stared at one another.

  “What did the detective say?”

  Hollis gave herself a minute to think while she readjusted and resettled her red-framed glasses. She hated passing on the message, but Candace had every right to be told. “She wants something with Danson’s DNA and asked for his dentist’s name.”

  “Oh my god! Do you suppose his statistics match those of the unidentified man? Is that why they want…” Candace’s voice petered out, as if she couldn’t bear to say the words aloud.

  “I’m sure she would have asked anyone reporting a missing man the approximate age of the victim to supply those things.” Hollis made her voice sound offhand. “I expect it’s totally routine—an elimination process. Probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  Candace looked doubtful.

  “Do you know his dentist’s name?”

  “Sure, I go to him too.”

  “You have his address and number?”

  “At home.”

  “Why don’t you go back to the house and write everything down. I’ll pick up a couple of items here. Then you or I or both of us can take everything to the police station.”

  “Dental records. My god, this is awful. Waiting will be unbearable. Doing lab tests and matching dental records—it will seem like forever before they have the answer.” Candace’s voice rose. “I don’t know if I can make it,” she said.

  Elizabeth, not completely absorbed in Curious George’s antics, raised her head. “You cross?” she said conversationally.

  Candace made a visible effort to pull herself together. She inhaled and exhaled slowly before she answered, “No, sweetie. But it’s time to turn off the TV and go home.”