by Bob Kroll
The gun exploded beside Peterson’s ear. Then again. Panic took over. He dug his right thumb into Miles’s eye. Pushing until Miles screamed wildly. Miles wrenched his body and pulled free the Sig. He had to re-grip to fire it.
In that split second, Peterson reared back and slammed his forehead against Miles’s nose. Blood blew from both nostrils. His arms dropped, and Peterson yanked the gun free, flicked the barrel against the cop’s cheek, then locked his hands together and snapped his forearm like an uppercut into Miles’s jaw. Miles toppled to the ground face first. Peterson dropped onto him, his left knee landing on Miles’s collarbone. Peterson heard the crack.
Gasping for breath, Peterson rolled to his feet, then quickly shoved the nine mil into his waistband and dragged Miles to the side of the service road. He fished car keys and an iPhone from Miles’s jacket. He ran to the dark sedan, started it, and swung it to the side of the service road. Then he tossed the keys deep into the copse of birch trees, removed the SIM card from the phone, pocketed it, and tossed the phone. He ran back and grabbed the shoulder bag, climbed into the Jetta, cranked it, and peeled off.
Chapter
FORTY-THREE
He felt it. Tasted it. The adrenalin that suddenly drains from the muscles and nerves and leaves the body a wreck and the stomach coated with fear.
It was all he could do to wrestle the Jetta into a strip-mall parking lot, where he stopped and bowed over the steering wheel. His eyes blistered like a madman’s and his thoughts raced, treading air, dithering and blathering, his body shaking like a blender at high speed.
Ten minutes, fifteen. He was still frayed but settling down. Forcing his breath to slow and his belly to unclench.
Twenty minutes later, he started the car and backed it up. Focused on what he still had to do and the time he had left to do it before Miles rattled a warning. To who? Tooka? Not likely, Peterson thought, gunning it out of the parking lot. Miles wasn’t one to squeal on himself. He eased up on the gas and took it slow through the bridge toll. Licky lips for the whisky in the glove box. Dared himself to tough it out.
At 9:55 p.m., Peterson was standing in an alleyway across from the address Danny had given him. It was a two-storey red-brick Georgian, with a centre front door, two windows each side. Bettis sat behind one window, draped in lamplight, his back straight, legs crossed, reading and sipping what Peterson counted as his second drink in the last half-hour.
The wind had swung from southeast to west, blowing crisp fall air and rain into the city. Wet leaves covered the sidewalk and street.
Peterson unzipped his jacket, undid two buttons on his shirt, reached inside, and turned on a digital recorder strapped around his midsection. He buttoned up and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He crossed the street, climbed the stairs, and hammered the front door. The bell would have been too polite.
Bettis glanced out the window, recognized Peterson, and came to the door. His welcoming smile was a little too welcoming.
No handshake, not on Peterson’s part.
“Isn’t it a bit late, detective?”
“Late for what?” Peterson said, pushing through the front door. “I have a few questions that can’t wait.”
Bettis led him to the room he had been sitting in, one filled with time-tinted oak and mahogany, and offered him a chair, which Peterson did not take. Then Bettis sat back where he had been sitting, beside a round parlour table under a portrait of a Victorian lady. Peterson prowled around two tilt-top tables and between two Windsor chairs with scrolled arms and stencilled seats, looking for something similar to the background in the video.
“This furniture as old as it looks?” Peterson asked, fingering a heart-and-star inlay in a work table.
“I collect art and antiques,” Bettis said. He watched Peterson make his way about the room and stop before a dish dresser being used as a sideboard.
“I collect things too,” Peterson said.
“Really?”
“I thought maybe you could help me with a few items I collected.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Peterson took the photos out of his jacket pocket.
“Here’s five,” he said. He passed one to Bettis. “This one you know, the girl who sliced her wrist in the Broken Promise. Her name is Molly.”
“Molly?”
“Yeah, Molly, from Newfoundland.”
Peterson passed Bettis another photo. “And this one is Michelle MacKinnon from St. Thomas, Ontario. You probably know her as Mickey Mac.”
Bettis looked at the photo. His face was empty of expression. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know her.”
“She was one of your patients,” Peterson said. “Hospital records have her down as one. According to some nurses at Stoddard, she was one of your favourites. The private consultations in the room across from your office weren’t enough, so you discharged her to the street, where she’s been screwed, blued, and tattooed. She’s now loading her arm and turning tricks in the back seat of an abandoned car.” Peterson moved close to Bettis and leaned into the psychiatrist’s face. “Is that part of the cure?”
Bettis recoiled. “I don’t appreciate the insinuation.”
Peterson pointed at another photo. “What about the Hargrove girl, remember her?”
Bettis held Peterson’s eyes, refusing to play Peterson’s game of show and tell.
“You didn’t look,” Peterson said.
Bettis still held Peterson’s eyes.
“Five of your favourites,” Peterson said. “How many others were there?”
Bettis handed back the photos. “I’m sure there’s a point to all of this.”
Peterson took the photos and walked out of the room into the hallway. The door opposite was closed. Peterson marched in and flicked on the overhead lights.
Bettis was close behind. “You can’t barge into my house and do what you want!”
Peterson turned on him. “I’m just checking out your collection and comparing it to mine.” He unzipped the shoulder bag and stowed the photos. “You don’t want to show me, I’ll leave. But I’ll come back, next time with a warrant.”
“A warrant for what?”
Peterson ignored the question. He’d just seen what he had come to see. This was Bettis’s showroom. “Funky,” Heather McBride had called it. “Psychiatrist weird.” Abstract paintings on the walls. Sculptures on the floor and on pedestals.
“It’s déjà vu,” Peterson said, standing back from an abstract painting like an art critic.
“What is?” Bettis stuck close.
“Being here. I’ve never been in here before, but it looks and feels so familiar. Like this painting, I’d swear I’ve seen it before.”
“I doubt you have,” Bettis said. “It’s an original Gabriel Adair.”
“Yeah, but you’re a shrink, you know the feeling I’m talking about. Like I’ve been here or seen it before. Like the glass case with the knick-knacks —”
“Those are hardly knick-knacks.”
“But I’ve seen it before. Up here, I guess,” he said, pointing at his head. “Out of focus, you know, when the camera’s aimed at something else and the painting or glass case just gets in the shot.”
“Why are you here?” Bettis asked. Cold smile, sharp eyes.
Peterson ignored him. He eyed a couple more paintings and the sculpture of the earth mother with the big boobs. “I’d swear I’ve seen this before.”
Then he saw a group of framed photographs that took him by surprise. There were six in all, one within a circle of five. They hung above a mahogany sideboard. The five photos, taken from various angles, were action shots of a two-masted sloop cutting the water like split. It was the same sloop as in the large photograph on the office wall at Stoddard, the Jelly Fish.
The centre photograph was of Bettis at the wheel. It was taken from behind to sho
w off the masts and rigging, the polished deck, and spray over the bow. Bettis was shirtless and looking back over his shoulder at the camera, beaming. On his shoulder was the tattoo of a ram.
Peterson turned slowly from the framed photo to Bettis. “Your boat?”
“Yes.”
“It must make you proud owning something like that.”
“My pride and joy,” Bettis said. “Most important thing I own.”
“Good name,” Peterson said, without taking his eyes off him. “Jelly Fish.”
“Would you mind telling me what this is about?” Bettis demanded. Firm voice. Uncomfortable eyes that travelled from Peterson to the photos on the wall.
Peterson turned back to the photo, tapped it. “A tattoo like that is special, right?”
“Original design.”
“That’s special. That’s what I mean. A man with a special tattoo. It means something. It’s a ram, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re the only one with a tattoo like that?”
Bettis lost the charm. “What is this about?”
Peterson took the flash drive from his pants pocket. “One of your patients, Molly, the girl in the Broken Promise, she had this when she killed herself. I think it’s yours. I think she lifted it the last time she was here.”
Bettis stared. His left thumb flicked across his fingers.
“She was fifteen, maybe sixteen years old,” Peterson said. He started to sit in the stuffed armchair, but he changed his mind and remained standing. “There’s about fifteen minutes of video on this. Child pornography. All of it shot in this room. You know where this is going?”
“No, I don’t.” Bettis’s voice had lost all self-assurance.
“Someone edited the video but didn’t do a very good job,” Peterson said, watching Bettis’s reaction. “He left in one frame of one scene, a girl leaning over that chair. This guy was on her and going to town doggie style. The guy was naked. And on his left shoulder was a tattoo just like the one in that photograph.”
Bettis looked at the photograph on the wall. He didn’t answer. He barely breathed.
Peterson shoved the flash drive back into his pants pocket. Then he dug into the shoulder bag for the hard drive. Taking a chance. “The photo makes a good case,” Peterson said, colouring his voice with certainty, “but seeing you in action makes a better one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The passwords we pick,” Peterson said. “Something easy to remember, mother’s name, dog’s name, something we own, our pride and joy — something like Jelly Fish.”
Bettis’s jaw dropped.
“It was like playing a lottery number and hitting the jackpot,” Peterson said, bluffing his way, talking about evidence he hadn’t seen. He had done it before, pounding a suspect with nothing to go on but a feeling. “Home movies. Dirty details.”
“How did you —?”
“Some things are easy to find. More than enough to bring charges.”
Peterson had seen it many times before, the sudden defeated look of a criminal: the jittery, unfocused eyes seeking refuge, the mouth suddenly dry, the tic in a cheek, the body shivering with tension.
He had him. Peterson knew it and so did Bettis. And all of a sudden the loathing Peterson felt for this man came to a head. His insides churned to bust the man. And in that churning, he saw Molly’s tortured face. He saw her blood spurting, the flayed flesh, and her wrist sliced to the bone. He saw the drug-racked face of Mickey Mac, and he saw other girls naked to this weasley man, stoned and weakened under his weight.
“I saw how you like it rough,” Peterson said, pressing his luck. “Hurt them a little, maybe a lot? Teenage girls. Younger. You know what that makes you behind bars? Word gets around prison and you know what they’re going to do with you? They’re going to make it hurt. Oh yeah! And inmates know how to hurt.”
There was fear in Bettis’s eyes.
“This time you don’t walk away from it,” Peterson said. “Not this time. No simple complaint from a psychiatric patient. No hand slap. Not this time.” He held up the hard drive. “This time there’s real evidence, and staff willing to testify. You’ll get four, maybe five years with time off. That’s a long stretch behind bars. Day and night looking over your shoulder, wondering all the time which one of those motherfuckers is going to make you his wife. You’re going to pay for the hurt you gave those girls. You’re going to find out what it’s like to get it up the ass.”
Bettis caught his breath. His legs gave out and he clutched a chair back to steady himself and dropped into the seat.
Peterson grabbed a wooden chair and set it close to Bettis. He sat and leaned forward so Bettis could feel his breath.
“That’s what they do to pedophiles in prison. Everybody gets a turn. Humped over your bed in a jail cell. Up and down the line until some big dude says, ‘You’re mine!’”
“Stop!” Bettis cried.
But Peterson didn’t stop. “Any of those girls beg you to stop? Or did you have them too drugged up to feel a thing? But you’ll feel it! A candy ass like you will be wishing you could draw glass across your wrist.”
Bettis whimpered.
“Hard evidence. People that will testify. It’s over.” His voice lowered. “It’s over.”
Bettis mumbled something and his head fell, as though he had lost the strength to hold it up.
Peterson knew the body language of a criminal when he breaks, a man weakened by what he has been doing and now relieved that it is over.
Peterson turned Bettis’s face so they were eye to eye. “It’s time to talk. Get it off your chest. The hard drive tells the story, but now for the details. I want names. I want you blowing cover for the big shots you share the girls with. And I want the ins and outs of your arrangement with Tooka.”
Bettis started to shake his head, but Peterson tightened his grip on his face. “You get it nine ways to Sunday in the Big House, or I can do you a big, big favour. Ball’s in your court!”
Bettis didn’t take long to think about it. He nodded and gave Peterson what he was asking for. Three names. Big shots. David Heaney, CEO of Edgar-Eco Resources; James Williston, sitting senator from the Conservative Party; and Richard Pratz, CEO of Blatch, Collins, and Werner Pharmaceuticals and board member at Stoddard. There were several others, but none of them had the prestige and political and social clout as those three.
“Years,” Bettis said. Vacant eyes. Desperate to tell it. A craven begging to pardon himself. “Fifteen. More. Alone. Keeping it to myself, until …”
“Until someone caught on to what you were doing,” Peterson led him.
“Yes.”
“Nurses?”
Bettis nodded. “Changing hospitals. And then it got so involved.”
“By including others?”
“Pratz wanted them. He had friends. A club he called it. A private club.”
Peterson sensed where Bettis was going. More players, more girls, more risk, which meant taking the sleazy games outside the hospital.
“Did you go to Tooka, or Tooka come to you?”
Bettis swallowed hard. “I went to him.”
“How did that happen?”
“I asked around. You learn who to ask. Then I got a visit.”
“From Tooka?”
“No. Someone else.”
“You asked for young girls?”
Bettis didn’t have to answer. His face said it all.
“How young?” Peterson demanded.
Bettis shook his head.
“How young?”
“Early teens,” Bettis said. “Pratz wanted them younger, but I didn’t.”
“What about the others? What did they like?”
“Williston and Heaney wanted them as young as they could get.”
&nb
sp; “And Tooka provided?”
Bettis buried his face in his hands.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Yes.”
“You tried some out in the hospital,” Peterson said, struggling to control his feelings, forcing his voice to sound calm. “Closed door, private consultations. Then you discharged your favourites to Tooka. Pick of the crop. But Molly you couldn’t discharge. So you walked her out the front door.”
Bettis looked up, quick to shift blame. “Pratz wanted her too. It was his idea.”
“But you went along.”
“Because … the risk of it. The pleasure. Nurses outside the door. They could have heard it all, but I didn’t care. It was like before.”
“In the other hospitals?”
“No planning. No videos. A sudden urge. That’s all. A need. A coarse need.”
Peterson struggled to stay cool. He locked his mind on what needed doing. “So what happened to Tiffany Banks? You get too rough?”
“Not me!” Bettis screamed. “You saw the video. You saw it wasn’t me!”
“I saw a guy slapping her around.” Peterson made it sound true. “He looked like you.”
“It was Williston!”
“And you recorded it!”
Bettis covered his face again. “She was dead … she was just dead.”
“Who buried her?”
Bettis lowered his hands. His eyes were deep pools of fear. “We got the body and her out of the house. His car.”
“Her? Another girl?”
“Yes.”
“Which girl?”
“The photo you have, the one who killed herself in that bar.”
“She was in the house?”
“And I panicked. Williston said he’d take care of it. He had connections. He called and the cop told us what to do.”
“What cop?”
“A cop! A detective.”
“What was the cop’s name?”
“I don’t know. Williston made the call. He knows.”
“What did he tell you to do?”