The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  “More than enough for Father Ronny?”

  “He had no idea. It’s not something a woman talks about.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “I told no one. All these years, and I kept it to myself.”

  There was a long silence. Then she straightened in her chair as though reclaiming her dignity.

  “Isn’t that enough?” she begged. “Please!”

  Peterson nodded. “One more question. Why Father Ronny? Why another priest?”

  Angela Harding stood to see him to the door. “I ask myself that every week.”

  Chapter

  FOURTEEN

  Reggie’s Place was breakfast busy. Peterson arrived five minutes early and slid into a booth away from the hustle of the cash register and front counter where a counter girl was serving the hurry-up-crowd with quick and tasty. The waitress, a wide-hipped woman with swollen ankles, had his coffee on the table before he sat down.

  Danny arrived at eight o’clock on the dot. The waitress brought him a coffee and topped up Peterson’s. Danny ordered off a chalkboard behind the counter. Peterson stuck with coffee.

  Danny doctored his coffee. “You only doing liquids now?”

  “Is ice a liquid?”

  Danny held up his hands in apology. “Only when it melts.”

  “Concern noted,” Peterson said, placing two plastic evidence bags on the table. One held his notebook, the other his pen. “These should clear Angela Harding. My prints and hers.”

  “She has motive,” Danny said.

  Peterson straightened at a sharp stomach spasm. Then he tried squeezing the hangover from behind his eyes. He signalled the waitress to bring him number six on the chalkboard — cereal, hash browns, and buttered toast. He swung back to Danny. “All the women in those photos have motive. But I doubt any of their prints will match those in the sacristy.”

  “We’re back to candles and blood.”

  Peterson nodded.

  Danny watched the counter girl pouring coffee to go for two young women and a guy and the short order cook plating sausage and eggs and a side of toast and dinging the call bell for the waitress.

  “That doesn’t leave us much,” Danny said. “Fisher’s alibi holds. There are eight people who will swear he was with them until one o’clock.”

  “And the woman?”

  “Alicia Wambolt. He was with her all night. She even bragged he got it up three times before they fell asleep.”

  “It’s boiling down to an empty pot.”

  “We still have a street slug with a grudge,” Danny said.

  “Back to candles and blood.”

  “Fuck!” Danny said, loud enough that people at nearby tables lifted their heads.

  “The dead ends are piling up,” Peterson said. “The Airport Road, now this. And Bernie has one that’ll go nowhere.”

  “She caught a break with the accountant,” Danny said.

  “A dirty accountant?”

  “He had a little action on the side. Basement office where he kept two sets of books for the guy who owned a chain of convenience stores. He stashed the embezzled money in his wife’s name.”

  Peterson allowed a smile.

  The waitress brought their breakfasts. They ate in silence, Danny ravenously, Peterson with caution. Then Danny said, “If not Fisher, then maybe one of his members, or someone else playing voodoo. I’ll interview Janis Low again. She might know more than she’s telling.”

  Danny left his partner toying with his toast. Peterson’s cell phone rang. He didn’t check the caller. He didn’t need to. He just answered and stared at the fleabag room that broke his heart. The shabby wall behind the unmade bed. The chair with a busted leg. The squalor that spread beyond what he could see. He heard a toilet flush, and then the screen went white.

  Chapter

  FIFTEEN

  That evening Peterson sat alone in the editing room in the Communications Unit reviewing the video images from the Broken Promise for the umpteenth time, advancing the video frame by frame, dragging out her death. Thirty frames in a second. Sixty fields in a frame. Imperceptible gestures. A shiver in her cheeks. Her eyelids closing. Her dry lips faintly whispering.

  He reached to her wrist on the monitor the way he had reached for it in the Broken Promise, but he touched only pixels of coloured light. He saw his face stupefied with helplessness, his hands coated with her blood.

  He now knew by heart the strange words she had said. He shaped them on his lips as the girl on the monitor shaped them with hers.

  “Albulla guberoa. Elbae dar albulla. Niandalaba nescato.”

  Words thinned through an equalizer, then, for the sake of clarity, brightened to the point of sounding disembodied.

  “What are you saying?” he said out loud to the close-up of the girl’s blood-smeared face. “What do you want me to know?”

  He leaned toward the monitor as if the girl could answer. Listening the way a child or true believer listens for a distant reply to a prayer. Lost in the listening. Abandoning time and space to hear her voice speak from outside the video’s sounds and images.

  His cell phone screeched, frightening him. He sprang out of the chair and pressed his back against the wall. He stared at the cell phone then lifted his eyes to see himself reflected in the monitor, ghosting over the girl’s tortured face.

  The cell phone stopped ringing. He reached for it and checked for messages. There were none.

  He scrolled through caller ID and saw that the call had come from the Birthright Centre. He pressed dial.

  After four rings a woman’s recorded voice said, “You have reached the Birthright Centre, where all babies are special. This is Peggy Demming. Please leave your name and number and either I or Anna Gray will return your call within an hour. Thank you.”

  There was a short pause then a beep then silence.

  He looked back to the monitor and to the girl still dying in his arms. He began to shake. He reached for the wall for support. Then he sensed someone behind him and turned quickly.

  Danny was standing in the doorway.

  “How long?” Peterson asked.

  “Long enough.”

  Peterson dropped into the chair. Danny pulled up another.

  “You need to get away from this,” Danny said.

  Peterson shook his head.

  “You need a break. You need to go home.”

  Peterson rubbed his face. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Then bunk at my place.”

  “I don’t sleep. I think. I think too much. And then I drink so I can stop thinking. But I don’t stop thinking. I can’t.” Peterson jabbed a finger at the monitor. “And now I have this to think about! Look at her! Who is she? I need to know who she is. I need to know why the hell she did that to herself.”

  Danny reached across Peterson and switched off the playback. He laid a file folder on the editing console.

  “It gets worse,” Danny said. “That’s Crouse’s preliminary. The girl was in her early teens. Crouse thinks she took something jagged to her vagina, like she was trying to hack away at something. She had a tattoo on her labia: the number nineteen.”

  Chapter

  SIXTEEN

  Danny played the video for Joe Christmas at Joe’s place on the reserve. Peterson stood at the window and peeked through the blinds, pretending to watch two kids playing in a puddle.

  Joe had been a Mi’kmaq band chief on and off for fourteen years. Now he was economic development officer for several reserves throughout the region. His house showed his success: upscale furniture, hardwood floors, Native American art on the walls, and an enormous high-definition television that made images so real they had Joe gulping coffee to avoid seeing the girl slice open her wrist. He grimaced at the spurting blood, and his gnarled hands fidgeted with the coffee
mug as he strained to hear what the girl was saying.

  “Albulla guberoa. Elbae dar albulla. Niandalaba nescato.”

  Danny watched Joe’s reactions.

  “That’s enough,” Joe said, reaching for the remote and switching off the video. “What the hell kind of a job you got?”

  Peterson turned back from the window, and Joe pulled himself from the armchair to face him. “And you, after how many years you come to me with this! A girl talks different, and right away you think she’s Mi’kmaq. Why’s that? Because she’s doped up and slices her arm like bologna?”

  “That’s not how it is.”

  “It’s how it looks. You want me to tell you what you want to hear. You got some nerve, Peterson. You got some fucking nerve coming to me after what you did.”

  Peterson stepped away from the window. He had thought twice about bringing this case to Joe Christmas, and now he wished he had given in to his second thought and contacted a translator in the Justice Department instead. But a personal need and a hollowed out friendship had impelled him to slip Danny the band office’s telephone number and Joe’s name. There was something else, a need in his gut to come face to face with a man he hadn’t seen or spoken to since … since when? He unwound a tangled memory of the night he brought Joe’s daughter home from the hospital to this house, to this living room, to this sober, straight-laced sanctuary from the dope dealers and pimps on the Strip. Standing in this doorway with the beat cop’s report in hand, trying to explain how a 911 call had brought the paramedics to that rabbit warren just off the Strip, where Joe’s daughter was shaking uncontrollably from an armload of over the top. Folded double on a gurney, screaming through traffic lights, as the young paramedic sweat buckets that he’d get a flatline his first night on the job.

  “You wanted her off the streets, Joe,” Peterson insisted, calmly. “I did what I could.”

  Joe stared at the blank TV screen. “You sent her up.”

  “I got her help!”

  “Help!” Joe turned sharply to face Peterson, advancing. “You call a woman’s lockup help? You call her learning to be worse than she was help? You call that help? Three years, Peterson, you know where she is now?”

  Peterson’s face went stony. “I tried the teen refuge, but she bolted. Back on the street. Back with her pimp. What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  “What you promised to do!”

  “I spoke to the Crown on her behalf, but he wouldn’t listen. Nobody would listen.”

  “Because she’s Indian!” Joe exploded. “Because all our men are drunks and our women are whores. Because we’re all shooting our veins or snorting gas. So what’s one less fucking Indian?”

  “That’s not what I think!”

  “Not now!” Joe turned slowly and bore a hole through Peterson that was big enough for all his guilt. “White girls blow their minds and run away too. It comes home to roost, doesn’t it Peterson? It’s not just Indian girls that fuck themselves up. It’s white girls too.”

  Joe dropped into his armchair.

  “You saying the girl in the Broken Promise wasn’t talking Indian?” Danny said to break the tension.

  “Peterson knows what I’m saying,” Joe replied from behind closed eyes. “And this girl,” he gestured at the blank screen, “she’s not from around here. She’s not speaking Mi’kmaq or Maliseet. It’s not like anything I ever heard. That’s why Peterson brought all this to me. That, and because he wants to say he’s sorry and doesn’t know how, because he’s worried like hell that what he’s really looking for is someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

  Joe pulled out the flash drive and handed it to Danny, looking past him to Peterson. “I don’t know what she’s talking. It’s not my language.”

  Chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  Danny swung the car from the driveway and started off the reserve. They drove the unpaved road in silence. Then he said, “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Peterson said and looked out the side window at the passing trees.

  Danny’s cell phone rang and he took the call.

  Peterson stared straight ahead, unseeing, remembering, searching the back of his mind for a place to hide.

  Danny ended the call as he turned right onto a secondary road, spinning the steering wheel and catching Peterson’s brooding distraction. On the highway, heading back into the city, he spoke again. “We may have caught a break with the girl from the Broken Promise,” he said. “Anonymous tip from a phone booth. Somebody doesn’t want to get involved with a nutcase. Looks like the girl used to be a patient at Stoddard. A follow-up call to the hospital confirmed it.”

  No tall iron fences or high stone walls surrounded the Stoddard Mental Health Centre, a bleak five-storey red-brick complex that sandblasting and repointing had not revived. There was just a low hedge and a stand of birch separating the building from a service road, a tree-shaded driveway, a flower garden with a pergola, and a grouping of several Adirondack chairs. Next to the building was a paved parking lot, one side for a dozen visitor spaces, and the other side, closer to the front door, with a dozen spaces reserved for staff. Five of the staff spaces were assigned to the hospital’s administrator, staff psychiatrists, and communications officer.

  The lobby was an enlarged hallway, more of a thoroughfare, between a small coffee shop at one end and elevators at the other. A security guard sat in a glassed-in booth dead centre. There was a bank of monitors along one wall of the security booth. Hospital surveillance.

  From what Peterson saw, the cameras covered the parking lot, the main entranceway, the lobby, and the waiting area in front of the elevator doors on the patient floors.

  Heather McBride, an athletic woman with auburn hair and long legs, met them in the lobby to take them to the boardroom on the fifth floor. She had an elevator key that unlocked access to the top floor. She gave them the ten-cent spiel about the hospital’s dedication to relieving the anguish of the mentally ill and returning them to society as active, happy, and contributing members.

  The boilerplate patter went in one ear and out the other, while Danny tried not to stare at the woman’s legs and Peterson looked at their reflections in the stainless steel walls. The contrast amused him: Heather McBride neatly dressed in a beige skirt suit, and Danny and himself, two rumpled and mopey detectives who had abandoned the button-down look years ago. He tightened his stomach and remembered to smile.

  The elevator doors opened to offices at the front of the building, and a small cafeteria, staff lounge, consult room, and executive boardroom at the back. The boardroom’s wall-to-wall carpet, drapes, long oak table, and leather armchairs were various shades of brown. There were brief introductions. No handshakes, certainly none offered or accepted by Danny and Peterson.

  Heather McBride sat down at the head of the table, flanked by Dr. Philip Hamlin and Dr. Karl Bettis. Richard Pratz, a member of the hospital’s board of directors and the CEO of Blatch, Collins, and Werner Pharmaceuticals, sat behind the hospital administrators. Compared to the work-a-day appearance of Bettis and Hamlin, the silver-haired Pratz was well tanned, well attired, and well kept for a man Peterson figured was in his late sixties.

  Heather McBride leaned forward to present Peterson and Danny with details about the girl. To Peterson’s ear, Heather’s voice had that stagy quality of delivering lines that were memorized. He hated the barebones of a prepared statement, the lack of dirt that often came with practice.

  “Almost eleven months ago hunters found her under a blanket of pine boughs in the woods off the 104 Highway near Gowanus Corner. She was hungry but not starved, cold but not hypothermic. They called the RCMP. The RCMP reported her conversation as disjointed, hallucinatory. She either knew nothing or would say nothing about herself.”

  Peterson interrupted McBride by changing his seat for one closer to Dr
. Bettis, a homey man in a wrinkled white coat and uncombed hair, yet grand in the way he held his shoulders back and kept his chin raised. He had hazel eyes, and his gaze flitted about the room like a butterfly. Nervous? Or just flighty?

  Danny followed Peterson’s lead and moved to a chair across from Peterson and beside Dr. Philip Hamlin.

  “Did the Mounties try to ID the girl?” Peterson asked.

  McBride answered with a little less confidence. “They said they checked her out against photos of runaways and missing persons.”

  “And they turned up nothing.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you never asked the girl her name?”

  “Of course we did. Every conversation.” McBride looked to the others for support, as though she’d suddenly found herself on shaky ground.

  Dr. Bettis responded, his voice as high-toned as his mannerisms. “No matter what ploy I used, she did not reveal her name. Within her own delusions, she may have had a very good reason not to. Or, and this is quite possible, she did not know herself. Could not remember it, or in her mind lost track of who she was.”

  Danny leaned forward. “How’d she end up here?”

  McBride hesitated.

  Dr. Hamlin suddenly straightened and leaned forward, lacing his fingers to keep his fidgety hands still. Peterson pegged him as a drinker: flushed cheeks, bags under his wandering eyes, lips dry and probably thirsting for a taste of something steady. Hamlin also spoke as though taking his cues from offstage. “The Mounties brought her here for a psychiatric evaluation. They had a court order.”

  Peterson made a note to check out the RCMP report.

  Bettis picked up the thread, “When she first arrived she was wild and required restraint. With medication and psychiatric counselling she calmed down considerably.”

  Now it was McBride’s turn. “She remained under our care, unrestrained. And there were no more violent outbursts.”