None So Blind (27 page)

He sent Lazlo home. He paced. Cursed his inaction on the gun. What if Julia had seen him handling it?

Goddamn!

Time crept forward. He checked with Dispatch. Checked his phone. Called the hospital for updates. Laura Quinn was still in surgery, still critical. MacPhail was still working on the human remains. Finally, his phone rang. Julia’s white Hyundai had been located parked off the road near the base of the hill where the old homestead was located.

“We’re on our way there now,” Sullivan said.

“Any sign of Laura Quinn’s truck? Or …?”

“Nothing. No sign or sound of human activity. We’re waiting for the Tac team’s go-ahead and then the guys will move in.”

Green bit back his impatience. A proper tactical operation took planning. “Any sign of injury, blood, or other tire tracks?”

“There are a lot of tire tracks. No damage to the vehicle, but there are what appears to be blood smears on the steering wheel and upholstery.”

“Okay, secure it and I’ll get Ident —”

“Already done, Mike. Things are moving really fast here, better get some extra Ident and maybe Major Crimes personnel lined up on standby, for whatever we find at the top of that hill.”

Sullivan’s last words rang ominous in his ears.
Don’t even think about it
, he told himself as he hung up. Finally there was something he could do besides stand around and pace. He bounded down the stairs toward the main floor and was just passing through the lobby toward the Ident lab when a commotion at the front doors caused him to turn.

Marilyn Carmichael was limping across the checkered floor, her head rigidly high and her arms cradling her side. Blood covered her clothes and seeped onto the tiles. Ignoring the officers who rushed to intercept her, she fixed her sights on Green. Her eyes were huge. Haunted. Black with grief.

“It’s done,” was all she said.

T
hey
found Julia’s body on the hilltop, slumped at the base of the stone fireplace. The saplings and wildflowers within the foundation walls were trampled and bloodied, as if a hurricane of rage had ripped through, but Julia had died from a neat bullet between the eyes. Marilyn had left the pistol on the top of the fieldstone wall by Julia’s head and had walked away without concern for the trail of evidence she left behind.

Sullivan assigned Gibbs to manage the investigation into Julia’s death, and within hours the scientists were all hard at work at the scene. Ident teams were busy retrieving fingerprints from the pistol and blood samples from the site of the old homestead as well as Julia’s car. MacPhail, complaining that Green’s body count was now so high he wouldn’t get to Julia until next week, delegated her autopsy to a junior associate.

No one was disputing how Julia died, nor at whose hand. Green and Sullivan took a peek at Ident’s photos of the gunshot wound and privately concurred from the stippling pattern that she’d likely been shot from less than three feet away, with the muzzle close but not directly against the skin.

Self-defence, or execution?

Marilyn herself had been whisked from the police station to the hospital to undergo surgery for a stab wound to the abdomen that had missed her liver by millimetres. Since her initial statement in the middle of the police station lobby, she had barely spoken a word, and when Gibbs was finally granted permission by her doctors for a preliminary interview, he found her uninterested and unco-operative, answering only in shrugs and monosyllables.

“Have you any children?” she finally asked him. When he avoided the questions, she looked at him squarely and said, “Then you don’t understand. None of this matters.”

Gibbs returned to the station frustrated and cowed. “I’ll try again, sir,” he said gamely. “Give her some time to recover.”

Green suspected time would change nothing. Marilyn had retreated to that dark, desolate place within herself where all ties that bound her to the outside world were gone.

And who could blame her?

It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening before Green and Sullivan had the tangled threads of the investigations sufficiently under control to leave the station. Just before Green shut down his computer, a memo from Superintendent Neufeld popped up in his email.

My office, 8 a.m. Monday morning.

He logged off before he could shoot back a reply he’d regret. His career was already in free fall. Neufeld had been conspicuously absent through most of the afternoon drama, closeted with senior brass on high-level planning. She was going to let him swing, and as if he didn’t have enough on his plate, she’d given him the whole weekend to stew about it.

When he stumbled home to a late dinner, he was finally able to broach the subject of his father. To his immense gratitude, Sharon didn’t hesitate. Of course he comes home, she said, and let’s not leave him another day!

Green slept badly that night and was on his third cup of coffee the next morning, trying to summon the energy for the day, when his front doorbell rang. It was Saturday and he faced a long list of chores in preparation for his father’s move. A rare interlude of peace and quiet had descended on the house. Hannah was still asleep and Sharon was in the backyard with the two little ones, ostensibly planting petunias. With great reluctance Green dragged himself to the door.

Cunningham stood on the doorstep, holding his laptop and two transparent evidence bags, through which Green could see a wad of twenty-dollar bills and a tiny security camera like the one found in Rosten’s cottage. Cunningham’s expression was deadpan, but something close to a smile twitched on his lips.

“We found these stashed in the back of the glove compartment of Julia Carmichael’s rental car,” he said. “The video’s pretty damn interesting. Do you want to see it?”

In truth, Green wasn’t sure he could stand watching how Rosten died. The thought of Julia savouring her victory turned his stomach. But this new human side of Cunningham, and his unexpected abandonment of protocol, deserved recognition. Green stepped back to invite him in.

“I’m guessing it shows how she tricked him into drinking the Scotch,” Green said as he led the way through the kitchen to his sun-porch office, now in complete disarray.

“Not tricked,” Cunningham replied, shoving aside boxes to set up his laptop. “Just made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. She was happy to confess to the murder. Proud of it, in fact. Proud of outsmarting all the police and even her family.”

He clicked through links until the familiar scene of Rosten’s cottage living room filled the screen. Julia was entering through the patio door with the bottle of Scotch in her gloved hand. She was wearing dark pants and a hooded rain jacket, chosen, Green realized, not only to conceal but also to leave no fibres.

They bantered about welcome-home gifts, about the power of Facebook to reconnect old friends, about his accommodations courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.

“Better you than me,” she said with a smile. She fetched him a glass of water from the kitchen, offered it as a chaser to the single malt, and then lounged on the sofa as if settling in for a long chat.

“You’ll get yours,” Rosten’s voice replied. The camera didn’t pick him up, but occasionally the Scotch bottle filled the frame as he lifted it.

“You think so? No one has any idea. That dumb cop wouldn’t know the truth if it whacked him on the head. No one did. Not my precious mother or her idiot husband, who thought Jackie was just this perfect little princess. Not that cheating dick Erik. I fooled them all.”

“All except me,” he said.

She leaned toward him. “But it took you a while. You thought it was Luke.”

“Because that’s what you wanted me to think. That’s why you used his car and his belt.”

“Red herring. A classic magician’s sleight of hand.”

The bottle raised. A sip. “Why me?”

“Actually, I would have liked to use Erik, but I thought it might splash back on me. He … knows things.” She yawned. Stretched as if she were bored. “So when Jackie started blabbing on about you and your cottage, I thought, well, that works even better. Nobody would connect you to me. A couple of damning notes, the exam paper planted in her backpack. It was easy.”

“So I was just … handy.”

“And you liked her.” Julia’s lip curled in distaste.

“I barely
knew
her! There were three hundred kids in that class.”

“But she was your teacher’s pet. You thought you were such hot shit.” She wagged her finger at him slyly. “And now you think you’ve outsmarted me. You think I don’t know about that camera peeking out of your pocket?

“The camera isn’t the thing,” Rosten said. “Your being here is the thing. It’s all the proof I need. And if you kill me, Inspector Green will —”

She rolled her eyes in scorn. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to kill yourself. No camera, no incriminating marks on you, no troublesome murder clues for that dumb cop to pick up on. And me? I’m in Brockville. If I’m lucky, my car will even have a parking ticket. Easy enough to borrow another from the used car–lot guy who was too busy staring at my chest to ask questions. A nice SUV like Mum’s, just to throw the cops off if they have doubts about your suicide.”

When he didn’t answer, a small frown creased her brow. “Drink up your Scotch.”

“I like to savour it,” he said. He was sounding a little slurred now, and Green wondered if she’d already slipped him the diazepam in the glass of water she’d brought.

“Does your daughter like Scotch?” she asked.

Silence. She waited. Growing impatient. “Because if you don’t want it all, maybe I’ll bring the rest to her. Paige, right? She looks like she could use the lift. That baby has her quite stressed out.”

The Scotch bottle quivered in his upraised hand. “And if I drink it all?” he asked.

“Now you’re getting the message,” she said. “Smart man. You’ve lost.”

“Have I?” The bottle lifted again, and she watched in silence as he drank. Gulping now, no longer savouring. After a few moments, the bottle clattered onto the floor. She rose and came forward, looming in the camera frame like a monster. She picked up the water glass and pulled the camera from his shirt. After slipping the glass into her pocket, she paused and in final triumph she panned the camera over him, slumped in his wheelchair, looking up at her through hooded eyes. His expression was unreadable. Fear, perhaps. Awe. But just before his eyes drifted shut, he smiled. A tiny, secret smile that Green suspected Julia did not even see.

After Cunningham left, Green sat in the kitchen a long time, unable to shake the memory of that smile. The one small moment of victory for the man whose entire life had been destroyed by the woman before him.

The melancholy still hung thick around him as he walked down the hospital corridor later that afternoon on his way to his father’s room. He’d not planned to visit Marilyn, knowing he should let Gibbs have another try, but some indefinable bond drew him to her. Her privacy curtain was closed, and when he pulled it back, he found her sitting on the edge of her bed in her hospital-issue gown, her head bowed and her bare feet dangling. Every part of her seemed to droop. A thin IV tube snaked across the sheet to the stand by her bed.

She raised her head to look up at him. Eyes hollow. Bleached of life. “What do I say? Where do I begin?”

He paused. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t here to talk but merely to offer support. But the words came as if of their own volition. “Wherever you want.”

“I’m sorry hardly seems like enough for all the destruction I brought down upon the world.”

“Not you. Julia.”

She eyed him. “You’re a father. You know what I mean.”

“I know we bring them into the world and we try to give them a good start, but who they are and what they become …” He shook his head. “We have surprisingly little say.”

“But I conceived her, nourished her in my womb, nursed her at my breast, and she grew up to murder three people, including her own brother and sister.”

“You couldn’t have known that.”

“Couldn’t I? My mum warned me that Percy Mullenthorpe was no good, that he was cruel and vindictive, and that the beatings would only get worse. ‘The Mullenthorpes are all a bad lot,’ she said. ‘Crooks and thugs.’ If I had aborted Julia as my mum wanted, instead of stubbornly running off to Canada with him, none of those people would have died.”

“Those same genes produced Jackie as well as Julia, Marilyn. We can’t control what happens.”

“I should have seen it.”

Wincing at the effort, she began to ease herself back onto the bed. As she sank back amid the pillows, he tugged awkwardly at the sheet to cover her pallid thighs. She breathed in shallow bursts, holding her abdomen as she gathered the strength to continue.

“I knew Julia was different. Not happy or loving like Jackie. From the time she was a baby, she wouldn’t let me hold her or comfort her. She lashed out if she was frustrated. If she didn’t get what she wanted, she threw temper tantrums so ferocious she’d break things. She had her dad’s cruel streak. She’d hit Gordon or steal his toys, just to make him cry, and then she’d laugh. I thought she was just jealous. I thought she was reacting to her father’s violence. I even thought … perhaps … perhaps he did molest her after all and it made her twisted and manipulative just so she could survive. I read that’s what happens with abused children. When her dad went on one of his rampages, she used to watch him. I thought it was fear in her eyes, but it wasn’t. It was fascination. All those years, all the mean and thoughtless things she did, I kept telling myself she was unhappy.”

“We don’t know why she did all that, Marilyn. Your motherly instinct was probably correct. She was unhappy, jealous, and frightened.”

She whipped her head back and forth against the pillow. Colour blotched her cheeks and sparks flashed in her eyes. “No. I was deluding myself. Trying to ascribe a normal child’s feelings to explain her. No mother wants to think she’s spawned a monster.” She paused, weakened by her outburst, as if the word itself had sucked the strength from her. “That’s what she was, Inspector. A monster. And I … I refused to see it.”

He was silent a moment, letting her catch her breath while he turned her observation over in his mind. The truth was no one had seen it. Green had met plenty of cruel and vindictive people in his life, many sporting the meaningless diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder. The idea that Julia — scarcely more than a girl, troubled and victimized herself — was capable of the premeditated murder of her sister while at the same time setting up an innocent young professor had never crossed his mind.

“None of us saw it, Marilyn.”

She eyed him grimly. “No. And now all my children are dead, my house is burnt to the ground, an innocent man has been murdered, and his family deprived of the future they should have had together.” She hung her head, her voice a whisper. “That poor man. How do we even begin to make amends?”

He’d been asking himself the same question. Beyond the vindication of his name, beyond the inevitable financial compensation to his family, how could anything make up for the tragedy of Rosten’s life?

Marilyn broke into his gloom. “I’ve been thinking. My land is worth a few hundred thousand. Now that Gordon and Julia are gone, what would I do with it? It’s not much, I know. It doesn’t make up for a father taken from them, but I was thinking I’d give it to his girls. Maybe they’ll throw it in my face, but I hope they’ll understand. I was a mother, I loved too much, and I’m sorry.”

He thought of Paige, bewildered, overwhelmed, and fearing she too had spawned a monster. “It’s an excellent idea, Marilyn, and I don’t think Paige will throw it in your face. She’s a mother too.”

A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Good. That’s settled.” She sat reflecting a moment and slowly her face crumpled. “But there’s so much more. Laura, my poor, dear friend…”

“She’s going to be all right.”

“All right?” A bitter laugh died in her throat. “She will live that awful moment for the rest of her life. I brought that monster into her home, and she, like all of us, didn’t see its true shape. She made the mistake of remarking on the gasoline smell in her clothes and asking if she wanted her to drop them in the wash.”