by Scott Mackay
Ted brought Gilbert a glass of ginger ale from the kitchen. Gilbert took a sip, and was refreshed by how cold it was.
“I’m just curious,” he said. “For the record…are Phil Thompson and Stacy Todd…you know…a couple?”
Ted stared at the Persian rug for several seconds before he answered.
“Periodically,” he finally said. “When they’re not driving each other nuts.” Ted drew back and squinted. “They’re like Mount Vesuvius,” he said. “They’re pretty from a distance, but every so often they erupt. And then they have to give themselves time to cool off. Phil’s a workaholic. He lets the domestic side of things slide whenever he’s working on a project. He’ll forget about bathing for days at a time. He’s gone through a lot of maids because he doesn’t pick up after himself. He’s a real pain that way. The roadies used to hate him because he never took responsibility for his own stuff, especially when he was writing songs. Stacy, on the other hand, is a neat freak. God forbid if you walk on her floor with dirty shoes. Which Phil has done on many occasions. You get two people like that together, and there’s no flexibility…and…well…what do you expect? They love each other passionately…but they’ve never learned to cohabit successfully.”
Gilbert watched a monarch butterfly land on an ivy leaf outside the bay window.
“That song…‘Stacy’…the one off Give You My World…it’s definitely about Stacy Todd, then?” asked Gilbert.
“Oh, yes,” said Ted. “That was a bit of a surprise hit for us. No one thought it would take off the way it did. But then all the wedding bands started covering it…and I guess…you know…it got some longevity that way.”
“And what about Glen Boyd’s relationship to Stacy Todd?” he asked. “Do you know anything about that?”
Ted gave him a sly grin. “I think you’re getting at something here, Mr. Custom’s Man.”
“I’m just trying to establish…the kind of dynamic… I want to get a feel for Boyd, his friends, and his associates during the last weeks of his life.”
Ted’s face settled.
“No, I think you’re trying to bust Phil.”
“I just want to investigate the possibility that he and Stacy—”
Ted raised his hands, stopping Gilbert. Gilbert saw callouses from drumsticks.
“If you think Phil had anything to do with Glen’s murder,” said Ted, “you’re wrong.” Ted looked away, as if the idea pained him. “Phil’s the original peacenik. He would never hurt a flea. Do you realize how out of character that would be?”
Gilbert tried to backtrack as unobtrusively as he could. “So as far as you know, the relationship between Stacy and Boyd was strictly a professional one,” he said. “Stacy was his secretary and he was her boss.”
Ted frowned. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “Glenny was an asshole around women. Stace knows that. Stace knows how to handle herself. I won’t say it’s been easy for her. She’s always been independent. Phil has money. He could easily look after her. But she doesn’t want that, insists on having her own job. So she sticks with GBIA. Working at GBIA is all she’s ever done. She was twenty-two when she started. If Glenny gets a little touchy-feely, she just puts up with it because she likes her job a lot and doesn’t want to lose it. She knows how to handle Glenny. She’s always been good that way.”
“So…Phil knows about this? The way Boyd has this touchy-feely thing with her?”
“Yes. And occasionally he gets pissed off about it, but come on, Glenny’s harmless. The world’s full of harmless old stoners, and we just have to learn to tolerate them. Phil trusts Stacy to handle herself, and she always has, so if you think you might have an angle there, you don’t. Besides, I thought Barcos was your man.”
“No,” said Gilbert. “His alibi holds up.”
Ted shook his head doubtfully. “Well… I wouldn’t be looking at Phil. He’s not the type. He’s gentle. Like I say, he’s the original peacenik. He would never kill anybody.”
Nineteen
With a careful glance over his shoulder, and a look around the squad office, Gilbert, getting sick of the cloak-and-dagger routine, called up the Boyd case file on his computer the next morning. He clicked on the autopsy report. Luckily, the case-file software had no audit tracking system. He could take a look at the Boyd investigation with impunity.
His ideas about his new angle were now starting to gel. Here was Dr. Blackstein’s diagram of the body, the ligature marks sketched in darkly around Boyd’s throat. He double-checked the toxicology addendum, which listed all the drugs and medications found in Boyd’s apartment. Any number of the various tranquillizers discovered in Boyd’s medicine cabinet or on his kitchen windowsill could have been used as “date-rape” drugs. Looking at this list of hammer-blow medications simply confirmed Gilbert’s growing suspicions.
He skimmed through the entire document. He wanted to find out if Blackstein had taken any combings from Boyd’s pubic area. As expected, Blackstein hadn’t bothered with combings. Combings were invariably taken from female murder victims when rape was suspected. This case didn’t fit that profile at all.
He called Dr. Blackstein’s office. When Blackstein came on, his voice was rough, hoarse, and sore sounding.
“You’ve got a cold?” asked Gilbert.
“God, yeah.”
“There’s nothing worse than a summer cold.”
“God, yeah,” repeated Blackstein.
Gilbert told Blackstein what he wanted. Blackstein sighed.
“I was just about to go home to sit by my pool for the rest of the day. I’m sick, you know.”
“As I was saying, there’s nothing worse than a summer cold.”
“If you knew what was good for you,” said Blackstein, “you’d come over here and catch a dose of it yourself. We could sit by the pool together and drink Bloody Caesars all day.”
“If you could just do this one last thing for me before you go to your miserable fate.” Gilbert had to employ a strategy to keep this latest request from getting back to Nowak. “And I’ll make it easy for you, Mel. Don’t bother dictating an addendum to the preliminary report. Just give me a verbal on it. Add your findings about the combings when you dictate the final report, along with whatever you get back from Toxicology on the possible overdose. That way, you’ll be able to get to your Bloody Caesars sooner.”
While Gilbert waited, he went to the front of the Homicide office. He grabbed one of the complimentary newspapers, the Toronto Star, took it back to his desk, and searched for any follow-up stories by Ronald Roffey on the Boyd case. He discovered one on page four: NO FIRM SUSPECTS FOUND YET IN GLEN BOYD MURDER. He frowned. He considered the story so much journalistic baiting, and profoundly desired to put Roffey in his place.
Blackstein called back a half hour later. “You’re right,” he said. “I found three blond pubic hairs tangled up in his.”
Gilbert felt both elated and relieved. At last he was getting somewhere with this, and Roffey be damned. But he still had to be careful. He was treading dangerous ground.
“Don’t bother sending the samples through the usual channels, Mel,” he said. “I’ll come over and pick them up personally. We’ve been asked to move quickly on this by the deputy chief.”
“The old greased-lightning routine,” said Dr. Blackstein. “What else is new?”
But in fact, Gilbert felt like Harry Houdini, forced to solve the case with his arms and legs shackled.
He drove to Stacy Todd’s apartment later on, taking a consent-to-search form with him. He parked across the street and filled in some of the blanks—his name, his badge number, Stacy’s address, and a blanket statement about what he may need to voucher.
He got out of the car, dodged afternoon traffic, knocked on her door, and waited, but after a few minutes, concluded she wasn’t there.
So he got back in his car.
He knew he was taking a risk. If this search proved fruitful, he would have to tell Nowak he was working the case without
authorization. Who knew what Nowak might do? It was a chance he was willing to take.
He waited. He would wait all day if he had to. He had to do what he could to prove his new theory. He remembered Stacy’s condition the day he had taken her to GBIA, how she had looked so ill. He remembered how she’d gone to the hospital on the night of the murder, Mount Joseph, according the wristband in her bathroom wastepaper basket, supposedly for diabetes. He remembered how she had been so pale and clammy, like Magda. All this was tantalizing, but he was determined to be a cop from here on in, so he wanted a definitive lock on some hard evidence before he concluded his theory was true.
Stacy Todd pulled up in a taxi an hour later.
Gilbert gave her a chance to get inside, then walked across the street and knocked.
“Oh,” she said, when she answered the door. “It’s you. Hi.”
“Hi,” he said. “Do you have a few minutes?”
She hesitated. Her shoulders rose. Was she scrambling, he wondered?
“I have to go out,” she said.
“This won’t take long,” he said.
She paused, but finally said, “Sure. Come on up.”
He followed her upstairs to her apartment.
When they reached the landing, he presented her with a consent-to-search form.
“I have to look around,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She looked at the form through her big-framed glasses. Pink blotches appeared on either cheek. “I have to let you look?” she said.
“No,” he said. “This is not a search warrant. This is a consent form.”
“Why do you want to look?” she asked.
“Because we have to rule you out,” he said. “We may need some materials from your apartment to do that.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding relieved. “If that’s the case…” She took the form and signed it.
He went into the living room and snipped a few strands from her rug with a pair of scissors, just for show. Stacy watched him. Then, continuing the charade, he went to the dining room where he bagged a thread from the curtain. He felt awkward. During a search, he usually steamrollered right ahead, regardless of who was watching. But if his suspicions were correct, and Boyd had indeed raped Stacy, then, despite any involvement she might have had in his murder, he necessarily felt sorry for her.
She retreated to the kitchen, so ill at ease she looked as if she was going to be sick.
That’s when he went where he really wanted to go, the bathroom.
He wasn’t hoping for much. In fact, he wasn’t hoping for anything at all. If she was such a neat freak, the bathroom was bound to be antiseptically clean. But he knew he had to try. He lifted the toilet seat. The toilet was spotless, and smelled of Comet cleanser. There wasn’t so much as a coil of pubic hair anywhere. Same thing with the floor.
He continued his sordid little search. He felt he was really invading her privacy. He looked and looked, but he couldn’t find anything, not even behind the old water radiator.
He then pulled away the shower curtain and saw a drain-trap placed over the drain. He pulled the drain-trap away and found, stuck in its mesh, the squalid bit of evidence he was looking for, a single hair, of the coarse curly pubic type, blond, perhaps a match to the ones combed from Boyd.
Here was an interesting twist, he thought, one he would have to tell Sexual Assault Staff Inspector Vivian Gannett about after it was all over: combings taken from the rapist, not the rape victim.
He bagged the hair, then started looking around for any of the medical equipment associated with a diabetic. He opened the medicine cabinet and looked for insulin, hypodermic paraphernalia, a glucose meter, test strips. Nothing. He went to the bedroom and looked for the same things. Still nothing. He went to the kitchen and searched all over. Stacy stared at his every move. He didn’t find anything like a glucose meter or other such equipment anywhere in the kitchen either.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
He turned to her. She looked tired. And jumpy.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m finished.”
“And you found what you were after?” she asked.
“That’ll be for the lab to decide,” he said.
He left. He felt miserable. If his theory was true, what Stacy was feeling now was what his wife must have felt after she had come home from France. Used, abused, and humiliated. He descended the two flights of stairs to the street. Not that he thought Stacy had killed Boyd. Phil had likely avenged her. But that was beside the point. What he had here was a woman who had been put into an impossible situation against her will. He hated to think that once he finished his investigation he would end up making her suffer even more.
Gilbert took the combings from Boyd and the sample extracted from the drain-trap in Stacy’s apartment to the Centre of Forensic Science. While fingerprint identification was an official part of the Police Auxiliary Service, hair and fiber comparisons were carried out by the Centre. Gilbert shook his head as he climbed the steps to the front door. He hated to sneak around like this. But at least he could be reasonably certain that there was no memo from Nowak’s office circulating around the Centre. He could get the comparison done quickly and quietly.
If the wait was quiet, it certainly wasn’t quick. He had to wait three hours. The wait would have been days had he not decided on the easiest method of comparison. The technician finally handed the report to him around five-thirty.
He could have gone the DNA route. He glanced at the report as he strolled back to his car. Or he could have gone for neutron activation analysis. But both these methods would have taken far too long, and with his wife’s arrest imminent, time was of the essence. So he’d gone for a straight microscopic comparison.
As he read the report, he saw that all hairs were definitely identified as human pubic hairs, blond, all with a similar distribution of pigment granules, all structurally the same. The report concluded that the hairs most probably came from the same individual, but warned, based on criteria from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police forensic lab, that there was a one in eight hundred chance the two samples might not be a match.
Gilbert stopped on the sidewalk and considered this. Given the Horsemen’s odds, it was a fair certainty both samples came from Stacy. He was now convinced, given all the evidence, that Boyd had indeed dragged and raped Stacy on the night of June first. He tapped the report a few times. Yet he still didn’t feel safe enough to take it to Nowak. Or to even mention it to Joe. Not when Nowak had been so firm about his suspension and possible dismissal. There was so much at stake. He might lose his job. And he loved his job. Before he revealed any of this to anybody, he needed to definitively place Phil and Stacy at the scene of the crime in and around the time of the murder. That meant obtaining Stacy’s hospital record. He had to establish her movements that night, and that meant starting with Mount Joseph Hospital.
But how was he going to get her hospital record? A hot wind raked some dust in the street. He would need a court order. He would have to go to Justice Dave Lembeck. But he couldn’t go to Justice Dave Lembeck. Lembeck was sure to have the memo from Nowak’s office. He put the comparison report in his briefcase. Damn. Another roadblock. And he wasn’t sure how he was going to get around it.
When Gilbert got home that night, he found Regina and Nina waiting for him with apprehensive faces in the front hall. He immediately thought Nina’s test result had come back positive.
But such wasn’t the case. The test result hadn’t come back at all.
“Mike Topalovich called you,” said Regina. “He said it was urgent.”
“Daddy, why would Mike call you?” asked Nina, her eyes full of trepidation. “Have you been talking to him?”
Gilbert didn’t answer. He put his briefcase on the floor, lifted the telephone, and dialed Mike’s number immediately.
Regina and Nina stood by, watching with wide, mystified eyes.
Mike picked up after the third ring.
/> “Hi, Mike, it’s Barry Gilbert.”
“Oh…hi, sir.”
“What’s up?”
Mike paused. “Well, sir, I’ve got some news. And I think you’re going to like it. Carolyn finally got in touch with me. My third pre-Nina sex partner? They were on holiday. They have relatives in the United States. That’s where they were.”
“Great,” said Gilbert. “And did she give you her test results?”
“Yes, sir,” said Mike. “She doesn’t have it. She’s clean. Vashti’s the one I caught it from.”
Gilbert sagged in relief. Vashti came after Nina. Which meant Nina was now free. She could leave that awful place, the land of the terminally ill. He glanced at Nina, and already she looked different. Like the aura of death had left her. Mike would have to stay behind and face all the frightening demons himself. He felt sorry for Mike and Mike’s family. Mike had turned out to be such a nice guy.
“Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. You’re a good guy.”
“It’s the least I could have done, sir. I’m just glad it worked out for Nina. I’m really glad.”
Gilbert hung up. He turned to his wife and daughter. He didn’t know how to begin.
“Yes…” he finally admitted. “Yes…I’ve been speaking to Mike. I had to…to find out for myself. I had to do something. I couldn’t stand by and wait. I had to get the timing of the thing.” He explained about Carolyn, the two other girls, and Vashti. “And because Carolyn’s negative, it means Mike caught the infection from Vashti. He met Vashti after Pascale’s party. Which means he was infection-free at Pascale’s party. Which means you’re not HIV-positive, Nina.”
The color climbed into Nina’s face. She sat quickly on the hall chair—as if her legs were about to give out. She lifted her hand with a tremor to her forehead and her eyes clouded with tears. Regina gave him a questioning look. He could see she wanted to make sure he had his facts right. He gave her a covert nod while Nina struggled to come to grips with her unexpected release from HIV purgatory.