The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  Chapter

  THIRTY-SIX

  Tatiana Emerson ran her Irish Setter along one of the bridal paths that crossed the mixed stand of hardwood and softwood trees in the 190-acre park in the south end of the city. She was a black-haired, dark-eyed beauty in a cranberry duffle coat and brown slacks. When she reached the parking lot at the lower end of the park, she leashed her dog.

  Peterson was waiting beside her silver Mazda. He’d got her name from Danny and her whereabouts from her live-in boyfriend. Peterson greeted her with his friendly face and a good-old-boy voice.

  “Tatiana, I’m Detective Peterson,” he said. Not entirely a lie. An equivocation perhaps. He ruffled the dog’s fur then flashed a badge he had dug from a bottom drawer in the den, the one he had kept against regulations, a memento of his days in uniform before the four municipalities were amalgamated into one sprawling city. “I’m investigating the girl who killed herself in the Broken Promise,” he said. “She used to be a patient at Stoddard.”

  “Yes?” Tatiana said. She had a soft voice with a hint of an accent from overseas somewhere.

  “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions about the night she went missing?”

  “Right here?”

  “It will only take a minute or two.”

  “That’s about all I have. My son gets out of daycare at three.”

  “No more than that.”

  “Let me get Ginger in the car.” She opened the hatch on the Mazda and ordered the dog to jump in.

  “You were working that evening?” Peterson asked.

  “Yes. But I don’t remember much. You must know what it’s like. By the end of a shift your mind’s a mess.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The dog barked and Tatiana tapped on the window to shush her.

  “I reported her missing,” Tatiana said.

  “Do you remember what time?” Peterson asked.

  “Around nine. One of the other patients had a visitor and they were playing Scrabble and she threw something, a pillow I think, and it hit the board, and she just blew up.”

  “That was before nine o’clock?”

  “It was after supper. So it could have been anytime between six and nine.”

  “And after that, she just walked away from Stoddard?” Peterson said.

  “It happens.”

  “But there’s a locked door on the teen ward with a security guard,” Peterson said.

  “I know,” she said, “but they still get out. They are teenagers and they’ll find a way. Especially with the pass system.”

  “How does that work?” Peterson asked.

  “Dr. Bettis uses security passes to coax his teen patients out of their shells. To smoke outside, walk the courtyard, go to the coffee shop on the ground floor. Passes for consultations on the fifth floor. Staff never liked them. The whole thing gets confusing. Who has what pass and for how long. And then they double up on one pass or sell a pass for cigarettes.”

  “Security doesn’t stop them?”

  She frowned. “They try, but a pass is a pass to them. They complain. We complain. But …” She raised her hands in surrender.

  “Remember who the security guard was that night?” Peterson asked.

  “No idea. They change a lot. And we’re so busy, by the end of shift I can’t remember the staff I was working with.”

  Peterson opened the car door for her to climb in. “What about this last patient to run away, Stephen Emery?”

  Tatiana was half in the car when she stopped. “Oh my God, I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “I understand. Do you remember who had security on the teen ward the night Emery took off?”

  Tatiana settled behind the steering wheel. “I thought you interviewed Bill Gibson already,” she said.

  “I’m just following up,” Peterson said. He pulled an old card from his wallet. “If you think of anything else about that night when the girl went missing, give me a call.” He scratched out the printed phone numbers to the police station and wrote his cell number on the back. Then he handed it to Tatiana. “This number is more direct. Thanks for your help.”

  Peterson caught up to Bill Gibson coming off his shift that evening. He told it much as Peterson had read it in Miles’s report. Emery had a smoking pass. He signed out, went for a smoke, and never came back.

  “You’d think they wouldn’t let a lunatic out of the building,” Gibson added. “I shake my head, you know what I mean? Half of them should be in straitjackets. But what do I care? Six months and the province pays me to stay home.”

  Danny had Bernie track down the name of the security guard who worked the teen floor the night Molly ran for it. She came up with Jackson Parks, midthirties, rough around the edges, a cop-wannabe, a guy who loved wearing a blue uniform, eager to talk cop to cop, so to speak. He now worked the gate at a local brewery.

  The gatehouse was at the entrance for the tractor-trailers, a grey box with windows all around. There was a bank of closed-circuit monitors set into a console where the guard sat on a raised platform, which provided him a clear view of the loading docks, the street, and the main entrance to the administration building.

  “You want my opinion?” Parks said, intending to give it whether Peterson wanted it or not. “The staff there are crazier than the patients, and they’re crazy enough.”

  “You got a candidate in mind?”

  “Bettis was off the wall,” Parks said, “and a couple of nurses. I think they were taking the pills the patients didn’t swallow.”

  Peterson laughed to keep him talking. Then he said, “I heard patients could come and go as they pleased.”

  “Not on my watch,” Parks said. “I had a lock on those going in and out.” He tapped the table with an index finger. “Log book.”

  “You remember the girl that killed herself in the Broken Promise?”

  “Oh yeah,” Parks said. “The papers made a big deal once they got hold that she’d been at Stoddard.”

  “You remember when she was there?”

  “I have a good memory.”

  “You were working security on the teen ward the night she went missing. We checked the staffing.”

  Parks suddenly got defensive. “She had a pass. She didn’t leave that floor without a pass. You check the log book.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Yeah. Admin questioned me about it after she took off, like I let her out. She had a pass for upstairs like a lot of the teens. It was only good for the elevator between the teen floor and the doctors’ offices. They could go up to meet their doctor. But not when they wanted. They had to have a pass. Or have a doctor come down and get them.”

  “Much of that?”

  “Doctors coming down for them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some. Bettis mostly.”

  “The pass to the doctor’s offices didn’t get them to the ground floor?”

  “No,” Parks said. “Just that one elevator and it only went to the offices and stopped at the teen floor coming down.”

  “What would stop a teen patient from taking another elevator?”

  “Me!”

  “So to get to the ground floor from upstairs, they have to get off on the teen floor and change elevators?”

  “What are you getting at?” Parks asked, back on the defensive. “Are you coming down on me for something?”

  Peterson let it go. “I’m just trying to find out what happened that night.”

  Parks shrugged it off. “If she got to the ground floor from upstairs, then she was with someone that maybe took her down, a doctor or a nurse.”

  “You’re saying they don’t have to change elevators?”

  “No. Doctors and some administrative staff have a bypass key.”

  “So a patient could get to the
ground floor?”

  “So long as they’re with someone with a bypass key.”

  “And once on the ground floor they can walk out the front door?” Peterson asked.

  Parks shrugged indifferently. “Who would notice?”

  “Not security on the front desk?” Peterson asked.

  “I worked there a month,” Parks said. “Who’s a visitor? Who’s a patient? Unless you’re checking wrist bands, you can’t tell.”

  “And there’s no way of reviewing who comes and goes?”

  “You mean the video tapes,” Parks said. “I thought erasing them was a bad idea from the get-go. But who the hell am I?”

  Peterson thought about the girl not being missed in the ward until nine o’clock that evening.

  “What shift were you working ten months ago?”

  “Back then? Nights.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Yeah. I had a day job as a floorwalker in Walmart. I would have clocked in at Stoddard at seven. She would have gone up sometime after that.”

  “With a pass or with her doctor?”

  “All I can tell you is that they don’t get off that floor without either one. Not on my watch.”

  “Patients often meet the shrinks at night?”

  “Sure.” Parks said. “Night was when most of them went screwy. You know, the boogieman. They need to talk. Bettis was in a lot at night. Hamlin too. But Hamlin mostly had the older patients in the other wards. Bettis had the crazy teens. How’s that for a fucked-up job?”

  Chapter

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Morning saw Peterson sitting on a wrought-iron bench across from his wife’s grave. His shoulders rolled forward, arms slung over his knees, holding his smart phone in both hands. Wishing it to ring. Sending his thoughts across a few thousand kilometres to urge her to call. He had activated his own phone camera and thought he could turn the tables. Hold it up to the headstone and let his daughter read the epitaph: In Loving Memory.

  The police report was on the bench beside him. Bernie had pulled it, and Danny had passed it over. The report was three weeks old, but somehow it had landed on Bernie’s desk at the bottom of a stack of paperwork from forensics. It had taken her that long to get to it. The name of the victim had caught Bernie’s attention: Darryl Palmer.

  A woman walking her dog had found him sprawled across a little-used trail in the city’s wilderness park. She had thought he was dead. Whoever had busted him up had thought so too. Now Darryl Palmer was in the rehab unit in the hospital re-learning how to walk.

  Peterson straightened up and set the cell phone on top of the police report. He wasn’t one to talk to dead people. He had seen enough of them to know they were way past listening. What marked their departure were just silent stones.

  He walked back to where he’d parked his car. Andy Miles was leaning on the Jetta, waiting for him. Tommy Amiro sat in the dark sedan across the street.

  “You should drop a deposit on the one next to your wife,” Miles said with a self-indulgent smile.

  “You suggesting I’ll need an early one?” Peterson said. No smile, just business.

  “And if I am?”

  “You know better.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore,” Miles warned.

  “No, but I’m a certified screwball who’ll bust your knee cap if you don’t get off my ass.” He glanced across the street. “And I wouldn’t bet on Tommy Amiro taking sides. Unless you’re dropping change his way. And the frown says you’re not.”

  Miles glared. “You don’t listen too well.”

  “My mother always said the same thing. Deaf when I want to be. It makes choice easy.”

  “This time you chose wrong,” Miles said.

  “Like Terry Sylvester and Teabag and Debbie Wilson?”

  “It could come down to that.”

  “Now that does sound like a threat,” Peterson said. “Let me check my pulse to see if I’m scared.”

  Tommy Amiro blew the horn to get going. Miles raised his arms in a mockingly submissive way and crossed over to the sedan.

  Peterson watched him get into the car and waited until they cleared the corner. Then he blew out a deep breath. His hands trembled and his legs felt weak.

  Darryl Palmer shuffled straight-legged along a hallway, wearing two yellow Johnny shirts, one worn back to front and the other front to back, to cover his beat-up body. Braces on both legs and a foam collar around his neck held him upright as he pushed a walker a few inches ahead of himself then tried to catch up. A female physiotherapist walked beside him. When Darryl reached the end of the hallway and turned to walk back, Peterson saw that someone had also rearranged Darryl’s face.

  They were ten feet apart when Darryl saw Peterson and coughed out the anger that had been choking him for weeks. His body shook and the therapist took his arm and coaxed him to a nearby armchair on wheels.

  She turned to Peterson, showing concern at her patient’s sudden outburst, but before she could say a word, Peterson held up his badge and smiled. “He’s just happy to see me.”

  Darryl turned to Peterson. Winced when he saw the badge. “You said you weren’t a cop.” He squeezed out the words through a wired jaw.

  “I was undercover,” Peterson said, stretching it for convenience sake.

  Darryl shifted his weight in the chair, and it was obvious it pained him to do so.

  Peterson gave the therapist the eye and she wheeled Darryl to a small lounge with a wide-screen television and tables for playing games. She positioned Darryl’s chair near a window where the light was flat.

  It took several minutes for Darryl to settle, then the therapist left the lounge. Darryl tried not to look at Peterson. Then he did. The anger was still in his eyes.

  Peterson stood by the window, looking beyond the flat roof of the emergency department to the large empty lot where a high school had once stood.

  “She called you,” Darryl said. “I called you.” He spoke from the back of his throat, his voice a low growl.

  Peterson peeled his eyes off the skyline and looked at Darryl.

  “There was no answer,” Darryl said. “I left it with you like you said. Look what happened.”

  Peterson flinched. He made no apology, no admission that he had let them down; nothing he could say would make it better. He looked back out the window. “The police report said you couldn’t ID the guys that tried to kill you.”

  “No.” Palmer’s eyes filled just to think of it.

  “The RCMP found your truck burned out on a woods road, but you didn’t drive it there. You said you left it at the Rendezvous.”

  “She called,” Palmer said, “begging for help. I went, but … they were waiting for me.”

  “Was she there?”

  “No.”

  Palmer fell silent and Peterson let it last, not knowing what else to say, what to ask, but uncomfortable at the thought of just leaving.

  “I know what they did to her,” Palmer said.

  “Yeah,” Peterson said. “I found her.”

  They stared at one another for most of a minute. Then Peterson realized someone was standing in the doorway to the lounge, watching them: a guy in his early fifties, high forehead, thick arms, and a stance that said he knew how to handle himself. When Peterson lifted his head, the guy walked over. He offered his hand.

  “I’m Darryl’s father, Dickie Palmer.”

  Peterson shook Palmer’s hand. “Peterson.”

  “You’re a cop.”

  Peterson smiled to suggest he was.

  “You know who did this to my son?”

  “Not yet,” Peterson said, “but I’m sorry about it. I’m sorry for him and his girlfriend.”

  “I’m just worried about my son. When you find out, I want to know who did it.”

  Darryl had
shrunk in his chair, as if there was no love lost between him and his father. Peterson figured it had to do with the girl. A whore and a stripper, hardly the match his father would want.

  “You find out, then what?” Peterson asked. “The guys who did this to your son and the girl, you don’t want to tangle with them.”

  “That sounds like you know who they are.”

  “I know the kind of scum they are. They didn’t leave your son to be found. And the girl and the pimp? It wasn’t murder–suicide. Those guys blew out the backs of their heads.”

  Darryl groaned and Dickie Palmer stepped closer and set a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Maybe I won’t be alone,” he said to Peterson. “Maybe there’s a small army to do what needs doing.”

  “You shouldn’t say that,” Peterson warned. “Let the law handle it.”

  “Like the law handled it for my son and that girl?”

  Peterson fumed but held it tight.

  “My son has family,” Palmer said, “and his family has friends. We won’t just let it go.”

  Peterson had been feeling it too: civilized outrage. A deep desire to connive in an act of revenge. And he knew something else. Yeah, the cops would break out the shovels, but they wouldn’t break a sweat. They’d hardly dig. Scratch the surface, maybe, and if nothing turned up, so what. Another news day carries the public’s attention elsewhere.

  “I better go,” Peterson said and turned away.

  Dickie Palmer’s voice followed him to the door. “We may be fishermen, Peterson, but we’re not stupid. We’re asking around. We don’t need the same proof as you. When we find out, they’ll get worse than my son got, and we won’t leave them anywhere to be found.”

  Peterson came back at him, going face to face. “You can’t say stuff like that,” he said, hissing the words through his teeth. “Feel it all you want, but don’t say it.”

  Chapter

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Peterson had Heather McBride’s daily routine down pat: a Starbucks coffee before driving herself to Stoddard Mental Health Centre, lunch in the hospital cafeteria, eight hours on the job. On the drive home, she stopped at a gourmet food store to pick up supper for two, something she could pop in the oven or heat in the microwave. Then a second stop at the same Starbucks for a latte or an herbal tea, depending on the day. She sat in the coffee shop until her boyfriend showed, usually a half-hour later, sometimes more.