Murder on the Run

by Medora Sale

  “Not much so far. Did you get the note from upstairs?” Sanders shook his head. “I didn’t think so. Anyway, they want a mobile unit set up down there and the adjacent neighbourhoods combed for anyone who might know anything. Now.”

  “For chrissake! Do they realize how many ‘adjacent neighbourhoods’ there are to that ravine? How many men are they giving us to do this? One?”

  “As many as we like, they say. We’re supposed to look as though we’re doing something useful to calm down the citizens. Even if the activity itself doesn’t do much good.” Dubinsky shrugged and pulled out his notebook. “Well, this is what we’ve got. Number one: the lab found some gold-coloured fiber—a synthetic of some sort—imbedded in the girl’s sweater. They’ll give us more later, but it looks like carpeting, they think.”

  “Sure. And when we find out who she is, it’ll turn out she had a gold rug and liked lying on the floor to watch TV. Any word on her identity?”

  “Not yet. We might get something after the evening news goes on.”

  “There’s not much more we can do then. You go on home. I’ll see about setting up that mobile unit. I’ll look after it this weekend. It’s time I got off my ass and started working.” As Dubinsky picked up his coat, Sanders was reaching for the phone, his face blank and impassive.

  It was ten o’clock on Friday morning before Dubinsky walked into the crowded, chaotic office and pulled out his chair at the pair of facing desks that he shared with Sanders. As far as he could tell, Sanders hadn’t moved since the previous night. “You been home yet?” he asked casually.

  “You’re damn right I’ve been home,” Sanders replied. “Have you ever considered how much time we waste driving home at night? And coming back in the morning? Do you ever think how nice it would be just not going home?”

  Dubinsky gave him a guarded look. “No—no, I never do.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t,” he said. Why would he? thought Sanders. He isn’t married to a painted doll who trapped him with honeyed, reluctant submission and then turned into a screaming shrew who paid out her favours one by one in return for concessions, until they didn’t seem worth bargaining for any more. Sally was fierce, hard-working, and conscientious; she led Dubinsky a merry chase sometimes, but she was a real person. “You know, there’s an apartment on a sublet ten blocks from here . . . but what the hell,” Sanders said, clearing his mind for the time being. “The unit is ready to go. I have two shifts of four guys each. Where in hell have you been?”

  “I just came back from interviewing a Robert Donaldson who works for an ad agency—he’s an artist of some sort, I guess. His girlfriend—live-in type—called him yesterday morning at work to say that she had a job interview at two and was going to pass the time until then taking a nice long walk. When she wasn’t home by six, he guessed that she’d bombed it and hadn’t felt like coming home right then. That’s happened before, he said. But she’s never stayed out all night before, and after calling all her friends he called us. Anyway, he identified her—sort of. The hair and the body type are right. He’s kind of shaken. We just got back from the hospital.”

  “Could he have done it?”

  “Maybe. He said he was at work all day, putting together a presentation. Easily checked. Do you want me to look into it?”

  “Since you’re going to be sitting around here doing nothing, sure. By the way, who was she?”

  Dubinsky looked down at his notebook. “Mary Ellen Parsons, age twenty-three, commercial artist, currently unemployed. And the boyfriend’s apartment has that smooth gray carpeting you get in offices. I checked.”

  By Saturday at noon Sanders knocked on the twenty-fourth door of an imposing street close to the ravine. Beside him stood a taciturn young constable, hastily recruited from other duties to make up the special force demanded by the public, the papers, and therefore, the politicians. They had started Friday afternoon, and so far, the results had been less than worthwhile. Each fruitless hour spent reminded Sanders of the equally fruitless efforts made on each, previous occasion, and only served to depress him further. Sanders knocked again. Finally he heard slow footsteps, and the door was partially opened, revealing a bright-eyed elderly lady and a large and sober-looking black Labrador retriever.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said Sanders, for the twenty-fourth time that day. “We are police officers”—he held out his identification, which she looked at long and carefully before raising her suspicious eyes. “We are investigating an attack on a young woman just a few blocks away from here, and we would like to know if you saw or heard anything at all unusual or suspicious-looking on Thursday—this last Thursday, the eighth.”

  “Thursday, eh? Well, I don’t know if it was on Thursday, but I saw something last week that disturbed me a great deal.” Sanders looked up sharply at that. “I took Georgia here out for her walk at 6:00 a.m., the way I always do if I’m awake—and I usually am—and that’s when I saw it.”

  “What did you see, ma’am?”

  “One of those girls who deliver the papers around here in the morning, it was. It’s a terrible. thing, you know. It’s dark out when they take those papers around, except during the summer. Can’t you do something to stop them from hiring girls to do that?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t, ma’am,” said Sanders, with barely concealed impatience. “If you let boys do it, you have to let girls do it, too. You know, equality.”

  “Piffle,” said the old lady. “Anyway, as Georgia and I were coming along South Drive, there was one of those vans following the girl delivering the papers, moving very slowly just behind her. I tell you I was very worried.”

  “It was probably the manager for the district, ma’am—they often drive around to make sure everything is all right.”

  “No, it wasn’t, young man. Because Georgia and I went right over and looked in the window at him, and stared at his license plate as well, and he speeded up and drove away. I tell you, he was one of those rapists, and you people should do something about him.”

  Sanders smiled, weary of the endless politeness this sort of duty required. That was what happened—nobody had anything useful to say, but every crank wanted to tell him what was wrong with the city, the police, the neighbourhood. “Well, the young woman who was injured wasn’t delivering papers, ma’am. She was probably attacked later in the morning as well. But I’ll pass your comment along to the officers who patrol this area at that time in the morning. Thank you for your help.” He kept smiling until the door closed in his face, and he turned away. He wondered if “neighbourhoods adjacent to the ravine” could be construed as a description of Eleanor’s house. It did back onto a ravine, although it wasn’t quite the same one. Knocking on Eleanor’s door was a tempting thought. Except that he’d still have this sour-faced kid stumping along behind him. It wasn’t Sanders’ fault that the kid’s weekend leave had been canceled and his love-life thrown for a loop. That’ll teach him, he thought vindictively.

  Five days later Sanders was sitting in the mobile unit, cursing its limited space and general lack of creature comforts. There wasn’t even a bloody restaurant where you could get a lousy cup of coffee closer than fifteen minutes’ brisk walk away. And what did they have? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. At least fifty suspicious-looking characters had been reported, most of them quiet, albeit odd-looking, neighbours, a few of them aged rummies who had staggered in from busier streets and neighbourhoods, or up from the haven of the ravine where they spent their nights. None of them seemed likely to have had the strength or the desire to strip, rape, beat, and slice up a girl, even a smallish one. He had painstakingly followed up on most of the leads, only to end up back at nothing. And meanwhile the female population of the city was getting edgier and edgier.

  The medical report lay in front of him. Contrary to expectation, she was still alive, but only just. There had been traces of recent intercourse, which along with the patterns of bruising on h
er body were consistent with rape by someone with blood type O positive. Her skull had been battered by a rounded object, possibly about twenty centimeters in diameter. There was probably massive brain damage. Other than that, she had been a vigorous and healthy woman, which probably accounted for the fact that she was still alive. That, and an unusually sturdy bone structure in her head. She was injured shortly before being brought into the hospital, in the opinion of the first people who had seen her. That would seem to let out the boyfriend, thought Sanders, who was at work then. Besides, the grisly details were too much like those in the earlier deaths to make him a serious contender.

  The single ray of hope lay in those gold synthetic fibers imbedded in the remains of her sweater. So far Forensic had been able to establish that it was carpeting, and of a type of fiber patented by a U.S. company and made in limited quantities under license in Canada. Some patient telephoning had found them three manufacturers that used that particular fiber—it was pricy for a synthetic and most of the domestic market for carpet that expensive was for pure wool. Sanders had discovered that commercial clients, however, liked its durable properties and its imperviousness to damage from large rug-cleaning machines, and so it found its way into expensive office broadloom. Only one manufacturer was willing to admit to producing that shade of gold, and Dubinsky, working in the comfort of their own office, with their own telephone and coffee supply, was getting lists of people to whom it had been supplied. Impatient for an answer, Sanders called for the third time that morning.

  “For chrissake, Dubinsky, what in hell is going on down there? Haven’t you got anything yet?”

  “Hold on,” said Dubinsky, muttering as he reached for some papers on his desk. “It’s almost impossible to get hold of anyone in those bloody offices who knows anything until ten o’clock, and it took them forever to find who had the information, but here it is. All the gold was ordered by an interior designer, who says that he got it for a small mixed-use building on Davenport Road—an antique dealer on the ground floor, and some architects on the upper floors, plus, I think, an importing company. He’ll give us the names of all the people as soon as he looks them up. There was some yardage left over, which he had been planning to put in another smaller office he was doing, but the client decided he didn’t like it once he saw the colour, so the manufacturer jobbed it off to one of the cut-rate retailers on Finch—Family Carpet, I think. They sell a lot of rugs. The chances that they’ll know who bought this piece are pretty small, but I’ll go out there and see what can be done.”

  “Great,” said Sanders. “Either she was raped in the middle of the day in an office building on Davenport and carried off, no doubt under the amazed eyes of various passersby, to some vehicle and dumped in the ravine, or she was raped in the apartment of some thrifty nut who buys his rugs at a cut-rate outlet, or God knows what. Well, go out to the carpet place, and good luck.” He hung up the receiver and stared around him at the cramped walls. One more day of this and they’d be able to dismantle it, and return, empty-handed, to the Dundas Street station house. Still, he thought, maybe we should send someone to go over those offices inch by inch, just in case.

  Chapter 2

  April Fools’ Day and Jane Conway sat hunched over her desk and stared without seeing at the pile of Grade Nine lab reports in front of her. If only she could force herself to mark them, to get them done and out of the way. The childishly messy script and awkward diagrams of the one lying on the top of the pile depressed her. Perhaps if she put that one at the bottom and started with a slightly better-looking one? This was a stupid game to try to play with herself. She ran her fingers through her light brown hair with irritation to lift it off her face. God, how she hated Sundays! Dreary, drab, dull—the April sun poured in through her dirty windows and made her apartment look tawdry and poor. And she was tired, tired beyond belief, and felt wretched. The scene in Miss Johnson’s office kept crowding into her mind, the scene when her last thin thread of security and respectability had been neatly sliced.

  It had been classic. Friday afternoon, that’s when they always give you the bad news, so you can spend the weekend digging your fingernails into your palms in rage and despair on your own time, instead of theirs. It wasn’t really that she liked teaching. She had hated that first year, and realized that most of the students disliked her, except for a few drooping masochists who licked her boots and fawned pathetically for the occasional smile or pat of approval. It was Doug, in his smugly practical way, who told her that if she hated it, she should quit at Christmas; but of course she hadn’t. She had waited until her one-year contract hadn’t been renewed, so that she could suffer through the maximum amount of humiliation over it all. Graduate school had seemed such a haven at that point. In her naiveté she had thought that no one could fire you from graduate school. They just don’t call it that. Now what was she going to do? For years she had known that she would need a safe, conservative job to balance her private self, or. . . . Already she could feel herself being sucked into the dark chaos she sensed was all around her. Dammit! They had almost promised her when she had taken this crummy fill-in appointment—five months, and having to work with someone else’s notes and ideas, with every student comparing you unfavourably with the person you were replacing—had promised that when the science department expanded next year, there would be a job for her. Now what was she going to do? But her mind refused to consider the future. When she tried to think about it, her mind shied away, dodged, turned to other things, refused to compute beyond tomorrow’s teaching load.

  The ringing of the phone snapped her out of her mood and set her heart racing. It had to be Paul. This call should have come days ago, but never mind. This would make up for it at long last. Her voice was crisp and cool, expertly concealing the chaos that ruled her soul. The coolness degenerated into malice as soon as she realized who was on the line. “Oh, Mike. Yes, what did you want?” A pause. “That sounds dreary even as an alternative to marking lab reports. And that’s what I’m doing.” She held the phone away from her ear a moment. “I’m afraid it’s not something you can do in company, and I really do have to get them done.” Another pause. “No, I have no intention of making next week difficult because I didn’t get things done today. You’ll have to console yourself some other way. Try reading a book, or something. You might find it a fascinating experience.” At that she delicately dropped the receiver back on its cradle.

  This was useless. What time was it? Maybe she should go up to the gym and work out for a while. The calming concentration, the quiet narcissism of all those jocks, polite and pleasant, but never paying any real attention to the people around them—that was what she needed. To be accepted and ignored at the same time. A run would be too isolated; the emptiness of her apartment was already beginning to spook her. But she needed to work off some of her restlessness. She jumped up quickly and reached over into the corner for her gym bag. The sudden movement made her lurch for a second or two in dizziness, but she took a determined breath, set her jaw, grabbed her jacket, and headed for the door.

  As Jane Conway’s slightly battered old orange VW Beetle moved down the drive from the parking lot behind her apartment building, a nondescript figure in a discreetly commonplace gray Honda that was parked across the street started his engine and pulled out slowly behind her. A group of three girls chattered earnestly on the steps of a house up the street, and as the VW passed them they stared for a moment and broke into fits of giggling. Unaware of car or girls, Jane drove steadily until she came to a stop sign. She pulled over, stopped, and opened her car window. The gray Honda stopped behind her; its driver glanced about him, got out, and walked up to her open window, smiling broadly. She gave him a blankly frozen stare, bent her head to listen to what he had to say, put the car in gear, and carried on.

  Sunday should be a good day here, she thought, as she hurried down the steps into the health club. People were usually doing other things on Sunday afternoon: coo
king enormous dinners, or dallying with their lovers, or hiking in the countryside. Maybe she would have the women’s locker room to herself, at least.

  Damn. There was a tall redhead, looking slightly confused, standing in the middle of the room holding a gym bag. Jane glanced briefly at her, opened a locker, and started to strip off her sweater and jeans. “Excuse me,” said the redhead. “Are these lockers assigned? This is my first time here and I don’t quite—”

  “No,” Jane snapped, jerking her workout clothes out of her bag in a gesture which she hoped would discourage further chat. She turned her back and started to dress, suddenly shy of displaying her body in front of a stranger. You’d think I was a self-conscious fourteen-year-old, she thought as she pulled up the pants and dropped the top over her head. Then anger edged out her despair. Why in hell can’t I be left in peace! It gave her the impetus to stride out toward the weight apparatus as though all were normal, fixed, healthy, and even in her life. Outside the facility, time dozed on the quiet Sunday streets.

  He sat sprawled in his armchair, in a suburban development far from the centre of town, his long legs spread out in front of him, his handsome face slightly flushed. He was staring at his wife, whose plaintive voice was mixing oddly with the sound that blared from the television set. “Turn the fucking thing off if you’re going to say something, then.” She pushed herself up from the couch and moved slowly over to the set. She turned down the sound, hesitated for a moment, and then clicked the TV off. He continued to stare at her.