The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  “You don’t think he did it?”

  “I would be very surprised if he did.”

  Solar garden lights brightened where the shadows had deepened. Peterson stood to go.

  “Would you tell a court or a journalist what you just told me?” he asked.

  Gloria thought about it for a moment then slowly pulled herself to her feet to see him out. “I owe it to those girls, don’t I?”

  Peterson held her eyes.

  “Not the media,” Gloria said. “But if I’m asked to testify in court, I will.”

  As they passed back through the house, Peterson stopped.

  “I just thought of something that might play into this investigation. I’m not sure how, but you never know, and something tells me that you still have the elevator key that bypassed the teen floor.”

  The question caught Gloria off guard. “I do.”

  “I’d like to take it with me,” Peterson said.

  Gloria raised her eyebrows but retrieved it anyway, from a china teacup in a hutch in the dining room.

  “It’s just a feeling,” Peterson said and pocketed the key.

  Chapter

  FORTY

  Bernie was carrying a folder with the results of her search on the girls’ names Peterson had given her. The Hargrove girl had overdosed two years ago in a boarding house in the ass end of the city. She was D.O.A. The other one, Mickey MacKinnon was a seventeen-year-old from St. Thomas, Ontario.

  “A runaway a little more than three years ago,” Bernie said. “Off the map for six months, then she turns up here, a squeegee kid that goes wild in a condemned building downtown. A cop stepped in, called social services, and they had her evaluated at Stoddard.”

  They were walking the boardwalk behind a condo complex and a couple of waterfront restaurants. It was a shirtsleeves fall evening, still early enough for late season tourists to be strolling about.

  “Underage and her parents didn’t want her back,” Bernie said. “Can you imagine?”

  Peterson said nothing.

  “She spent a month in Stoddard, then was discharged,” Bernie continued. “Disappeared again for almost a year. She didn’t have much going for her.”

  “No,” Peterson said. “What else?”

  “She got nabbed in a crack house three months ago. No charge. According to the report, she’s well known in the neighbourhood near the Commons and strolls outside a pub in the north end. Some mornings she turns tricks for johns on their way to work. Uses the back seat of a Chevy Impala. I have a picture of her.”

  Peterson thought of Bony Walker’s story about the girl stoned out of her mind in a junk Chevy in a backyard, spilling about T-Fi and a bloody scene that was somehow connected with the Drop Zone. Another girl saw it all.

  They stopped under a light standard at a jetty. Peterson sat on a bollard and compared his photo of Mickey MacKinnon off the flash drive recording to the one Bernie now showed him.

  “Tooka didn’t leave much,” Peterson said, more to himself than to Bernie. “Use them up and throw them out. Sell her to the highest bidder. Who’s the pimp now?”

  “A guy named Vance Sheppard, twenty-two, with a long record for break and enter and living off the avails.”

  Peterson shook his head. They walked out to the end of the jetty and watched a loaded container ship sail past.

  “Anything on Tiffany Banks?” he asked.

  “You think she’s the body on Airport Road.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Bernie pulled another photograph from the file folder and handed it to Peterson. “Fredericton, New Brunswick. The photo’s from her high school year book. Alcoholic parents. They never bothered to report her missing over three years ago. And there are no records of her coming here or living here.”

  “What about Stoddard Hospital?”

  “Nothing.”

  Peterson was astonished, and Bernie saw it in his face.

  “You know otherwise?”

  Peterson nodded. “A nurse supervisor said Tiffany Banks was at Stoddard, and that Karl Bettis was her doctor. Who did you talk to?”

  “Someone in PR or something, a Heather —”

  “McBride.”

  “Yeah. She checked and there was no record of Tiffany Banks or anyone named Banks for that matter.”

  “Someone yanked her file,” Peterson said. He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his hands under his chin. “Someone didn’t want it linked to Stoddard.”

  “You want me to dig a little deeper? I got a cop friend in Fredericton.”

  “Careful inquiries,” he advised.

  “Tippy toes,” Bernie said and handed him the folder. Peterson slipped the photographs of Mickey Mac and Tiffany Banks into it.

  “Thanks,” Peterson said. “I heard someone else thinks you’re a detective.”

  “Connecting one shooter in two cold cases played well up the chain of command.”

  “You getting my job?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Peterson tried but failed to hold back the smile. “Watch out for Danny. He’s looking for love.”

  Bernie looked the comment off. “You need anything else?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Peterson said. “I could use a backgrounder on Dr. Karl Bettis.”

  He had the strong sensation of someone on the prowl, someone stalking him from the shadows of the tall buildings along the waterfront. From the time he had parked his car in the underground lot to his meeting with Bernie on the boardwalk, he’d felt he’d been tailed. And it was there on his return, toying at his cop sense like a cat with a mouse. He had slipped Andy Miles long before, but that didn’t mean Miles hadn’t caught up. And yet he hadn’t noticed anyone to arouse his caution. It was just a feeling, paranoia, a byproduct of his suspicious nature.

  He mentally noted the passing faces of pedestrians and the vehicles parked across from the piazza of retail tourist traps. The only thing that caught his eye was a dark green Chevy pickup, idling outside the entrance to the underground parking lot. One person was in the cab, the driver. The long hair offered no guarantee it was a woman.

  Peterson descended the concrete stairs, then slid between two parked cars to his black Jetta. He waited before opening the door. Listening. Breathing the oily, gassy stink seeping from the walls. He heard the dull sound of soft-soled shoes on the concrete stairs come to a halt then retreat back up, stop again, then come back down. A young woman emerged from the stairwell, smiling, looking over her shoulder, and calling for someone to hurry. Within seconds her boyfriend clattered down the stairs and caught up with her. Arm in arm they negotiated their way to an Austin Mini.

  Peterson got into the Jetta and followed the Austin up the exit ramp to the street. The green Chevy truck was gone.

  He drove the four-lane away from downtown, passing what little traffic there was at that time of night, checking his mirrors and seeing a vehicle that was keeping up. He jumped a traffic light, turned left, gunned it for half a dozen blocks, then turned right onto a side street and killed the lights. He quickly pulled into a driveway and cut the engine. He waited. Two seconds. Five. Questioning his instincts at the ten-second mark.

  Then he smiled as headlights flashed around the corner and up the street and passed him by. It was the green Chevy truck, now with a man riding shotgun.

  Peterson let the truck get far enough away before backing out and driving in the opposite direction. He hung a left and then a right onto a main drag and pulled into a 24/7 supermarket, where he parked the Jetta in a cluster of other cars. He shut the engine down and followed a couple of late-night shoppers into the store.

  After midnight, he paid Mickey MacKinnon a visit at her place of work, a corner in a low-rent neighbourhood that had been struggling for years to make ends meet. He parked on a side street with a clear view of Gaine
r’s Pub and of Mickey Mac hustling tricks in red stretch pants that showed off her spindly legs and a light-coloured V-neck sweater that she could quickly pull off.

  He sat and watched her for more than an hour, watched her climb into a Dodge Caravan rental, the sweater up and over her head before it drove off. She returned less than a half-hour later, juiced and stumbling in spike heels, flagging a hand at the passing cars.

  She went into the pub for a short time, then came out with a drunk on her arm. She led him down the side street where Peterson was parked and behind a set of flats to the Chevy Impala. Within ten minutes, she had the drunk off and went inside the pub with him. She was soon back on the corner prowling the sparse 1:00 a.m. traffic on its way to the suburbs.

  Peterson kept watching. Then he spotted her pimp arrive and start to keep tabs from across the street. An iPod pumped a driving beat through ear buds and into the pimp’s loins. Baggy jeans hung off his ass, and a flat-brim ball cap was cocked at an angle on his head. He was street-level muscle for a girl who had been rolled out as bait and fleeced of her teenage body.

  After a few minutes, the pimp crossed over to Mickey Mac and collected what she had earned. He counted it right there on the street. No shame. No worries. She must have mouthed off, because he offered her a backhand but didn’t deliver. Then he walked off and around the corner.

  Peterson climbed from his Jetta and walked over to the pub. He needed to see Mickey Mac up close; not to talk, talk had already shortened one girl’s life. He just needed to see if anything sparkled in her eyes, or if her youth had all been hacked away.

  She was strutting her ass and hailing potential johns as he drew close. She turned and lifted her drug-racked face to him. Her eyes were unfocused, neither here nor there, her hair wispy and dry, her voice raspy with all that life had made her swallow.

  High beams swept across the shabby street and across the bleak look she gave him. He held her look too long, distressed by the dark circles around her eyes and by her misshapen jaw.

  “I’m selling,” she said, indignant and looking him straight in the eyes. “You buying?”

  He didn’t answer. He simply stood there, breathing in the stink of the street and the sour–sweet smell of sex. Then he shook his head and entered the pub, ordered a draft, and grabbed a corner table, sitting down with his back to the wall.

  The pub reflected the worn look of the people it served — scuffed and scabby. Beaten-down men and women working off the ass end of an EI cheque or too troubled with demons of their own to make their way home.

  Mickey Mac pushed through the door and made straight for the ladies room. After a few minutes, she lurched out, wobbled against a table, then stumbled through the door. Something up her nose or in her arm, Peterson reckoned.

  He did the math. Two tricks an hour, ten hours on her feet, four on her back. Cranking up repeatedly, and stretching her veins like wet yarn. Skin like tissue paper. Likely sleeping in an unmade bed in a crummy room.

  He knew the score on Mickey Mac, like he knew the score for most of the runaways on the street — forty before they’re twenty, buried under a junked-up life with a load of horse leaking from their arm.

  His breathing quickened and his eyes flared. He gripped the table with an urge to fling it just anywhere. Then his cell phone fired a hole in his heart, and his spirit collapsed at the silence on the other end. Fingernails clawing at an open wound.

  Chapter

  FORTY-ONE

  Peterson drove the bridge across the harbour to a small park that commemorated the first settlers on this side. He read the memorial plaques, then found a bench and watched the boat traffic. Now and again, he glanced down the street to where the green Chevy truck was parked. There had been no sign of Andy Miles in the dark sedan, not today, not yesterday. Danny arrived ten minutes later carrying a briefcase. He plopped down beside Peterson, opened the case, and handed Peterson a Colt automatic.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing with this,” Danny said. “It comes with a toe tag, courtesy of the drug dealer I took it from.”

  “I’m just playing it safe,” Peterson said. “My entourage is growing. The green Chevy pickup.”

  Danny didn’t look. He had spotted the pickup before he had entered the park. “You run a licence check?”

  Peterson shrugged. “I know who they are.”

  “Worried?”

  “Not yet.”

  Danny pulled a folder out of the case and passed it to Peterson. “Bernie did the trace on Bettis.”

  Peterson opened the file and scanned the contents.

  “Not the first time,” Danny said. “Calgary, Niagara Falls, Windsor. He even did consulting work in Detroit.”

  Peterson stopped reading. “You’d think somebody would’ve discovered this.”

  “Medical profession,” Danny said, “walled city. They’re good at keeping bad news among themselves.”

  Peterson waggled the file. “Complaints but no charges.”

  “Nothing solid to stick him with,” Danny said. “Staff won’t speak up.”

  “Gloria Melanson will.”

  “Until some white coat stuffs a rag in her mouth, or a lawyer plays it out as ex-nurse with a grievance. I doubt he’ll get a slap on the wrist.”

  “Plays out like that too many times. You have the flash drive?”

  Danny went back into the case and handed him the copy Billy Bagnall had made of the video.

  “What if we could show that the background on this matches the inside of Bettis’s house?” Peterson said.

  “That still might not be enough,” Danny warned. “Loose connections won’t make it, not with the high-priced lawyers he’ll drag in. We need something airtight that links Bettis, and whoever else, to abusing these girls.”

  “And murdering Tiffany Banks.”

  “That’s a long shot,” Danny said. “You don’t know they’re connected. Anyway, we may be close to confirming she’s the body on Airport Road. Bernie’s cop friend in Fredericton chased down the parents to a house outside the city. The father wanted nothing to do with talking. He walked out. The mother wouldn’t talk either. But Bernie had asked the Fredericton cop to get a cheek swab if the parents were willing. With the father outside, the mother agreed. And she signed off on the DNA test so she’d know if her daughter was dead.”

  “And?”

  “And what? We’re lucky if we get DNA results in a week.”

  Peterson watched a sailboat tacking in from the harbour mouth. He spoke without facing Danny. “Let’s suppose there is a match and that Tiffany Banks was the murdered girl. How do we link her to Bettis?”

  “No hospital records,” Danny said.

  “Not in the administration files. But what if Bettis keeps his own files?”

  “Where? Home? Office?”

  Peterson leaned over his knees, eyes still fixed on the sailboat. “Bettis said something at Stoddard about video recording all of his patients when they first arrived. He studies the tapes. That’s what he said. And he offered to show us some. What if one of those patients was Tiffany Banks? That would make a direct link to Bettis.”

  “We’d never get a search warrant.”

  Peterson smiled. “I’m not a cop.”

  “That’s break and enter!”

  “Only if I get caught.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whatever evidence you get can’t be used in court.”

  “No longer my worry.”

  “I don’t want to hear that. You get caught, and time on the job will increase the length of sentence. A judge won’t listen to your lawyer’s request for minimums, not for a former cop. You know what they do to cops in prison, and the guards let them do it.”

  “I get in and out during visiting hours.”

  “Except that visitors need an escort to the top floor. Not to mention the guard on the
door and security cameras throughout the building.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Peterson said. He reached into his jacket pocket and showed Danny the elevator key. “And I don’t need an escort to the top floor.”

  “And if you come away empty-handed?”

  “Then we’re out nothing. I go back to cornering Bettis and giving him the third-degree, the old fashioned way.”

  “You’ll need something solid to make him talk.”

  “We’ve broken suspects with less.”

  “If he doesn’t break, you’ve shown your hand, and any evidence there was will be gone.”

  “We run the same risk with waiting,” Peterson said. “I’ve been talking to people. If it gets back to Bettis that I’ve been pumping Heather McBride, Gloria Melanson, and two security guards, we can kiss any chance of nailing him goodbye.”

  Danny disapproved, but he still pulled a small voice recorder from the case. “Billy sends his compliments.”

  Peterson smiled, but Danny saw only worry. “An unwarranted recording won’t hold up in court. Even a ten-cent lawyer will eat it up and spit it out.”

  “Still not my worry,” Peterson said.

  “Which means what?”

  “I’m not sure. Something I’ve been thinking about since we found Teabag and Debbie Wilson. While I was punching holes in my house.”

  “I’ve been thinking too,” Danny said. “It’s a can of worms. You open it and if some spreads on Tooka, his boys will unzip you like Terry Sylvester.”

  Chapter

  FORTY-TWO

  Peterson shook off the Chevy pickup by twisting through a maze of side streets. Then he took the highway out of town, gunned it to 140, turned sharply off the first exit ramp, and doubled back over the bridge on his way to Stoddard.