Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (39 page)

Meeting Trevor had transformed Dan's life. He now woke with a sense of excitement and purpose, a fervour he hadn't felt in years. Even Ked noticed it. “This guy does something for you, Dad. I hope he stays.”

“So do I, Ked.”

And so love came calling. Warm, funny, comfortable, just short of bearing tea and crumpets. A shimmering of light on the edge of the horizon. After all these years, it was looking like the real thing and standing in the shadow of the possible. Dan wasn't reluctant to accept the feelings, just slow to trust whether he could manage to love and be loved without losing his sense of self.

Purchasing the new home had taken a leap of faith. After leaving his former employer to work on his own, his reserves had dwindled. The housing market was sluggish; otherwise he'd simply have sold his current house and moved. Instinct told him to wait. While the country's neighbour to the south was mired in an economic recession, Canada had held its own for the most part, but he couldn't afford to sell just yet.

For the past decade, Dan had wanted to leave the city nearly every day. Toronto rubbed him raw in every possible way, but suddenly, ironically, just as he met someone who lived elsewhere he found he wanted to stay. For one thing, Ked needed him here. Ked's mother also lived in the city. Though she and Dan had never been a couple in the domestic sense — he joked that Ked was the result of his one slip into heterosexuality — their relationship was strong and central to Ked's life and well-being. In addition, Dan's best friend, Donny, lived here too. Until Dan met Trevor, that friendship had been the single most important relationship in his life, apart from Kedrick.

All this went through his mind as he sat on the stoop and finished his burger combo. He tucked the wrappers inside one another and stood, looking up. This was his future. Somehow, he'd intertwined the house's progress with the success of his new relationship. It was irrational, but the joy he felt on seeing the change was palpable.
If one went smoothly, then it followed that the other would too.

A ragged light showed in the east as he parked his car. The streetlamps appeared as pools of blue against the thinning darkness overhead. He entered a silent house. Ralph wagged a tentative greeting from his bed in the kitchen, as if unsure whether to welcome Dan's late return. Surely there were rules about such things, even for humans?

Dan emptied his pockets, tossing keys and wallet onto the kitchen table, before running a glass of water. He took the glass into the living room and looked around. It was a welcoming home, one with signs of good taste, even in the dark. The floorboards were worn and the rugs faded, but the overall design said “solid.” It wasn't exceptional as houses went, but it was a home and a well-loved one. Now he was about to leave it behind. Until this moment he hadn't thought how that would feel. Funny, he'd wanted to move for years, and now that he was about to do so he felt a sense of regret. It wouldn't stop him, though.

Light showed against the floor outside the bedroom. He pushed open the door and peered in. Trevor was sitting up reading by a bedside lamp. His features looked almost translucent, the skin pale with fatigue. His hair was matted from being pressed against the pillow. Dan guessed he'd simply given up fighting to get to sleep.

“Hi there.”

Trevor put his book aside. “Welcome back.”

Dan glanced over at the clock: 4:33 a.m. “Wow, it's late,” he said, as though it had just occurred to him.

“Or very early, depending on your point of view,” Trevor replied with a tired smile.

“I've just been to the new house,” Dan said apologetically.

“How is it? Still there?”

“Pretty much. Looks good.”

Trevor waited.

“I didn't want to call and chance waking you.”

“I was up. I was a little worried.”

“Sorry. It was inconsiderate.” Dan held out his Frosty, melted down to a gelatinous sludge at the bottom.

Trevor accepted the cup. “A very bad habit, but thanks.”

He sipped and returned it. Dan emptied it in a single gulp before dropping it into the garbage. He nestled in beside Trevor without taking off his clothes, as though another call might send him running
off again.

Trevor ran a finger over his forearm. “Anything to report?”

Dan hesitated. He didn't want Trevor worrying he was risking his health or his life. Having already lost one partner, a second who purposely took risks might prove too difficult to bear.

Dan tried to make light of it. “I broke Rule Number One of surviving in a horror film: Don't go into a room with the lights off.”

He gave a brief account of his find, without mentioning the state he'd found the body in. It might or might not make the newspapers over the next few days, but there was no need to force-feed Trevor the gruesome details.

“Is there more?”

Dan nodded slightly. “Whoever it was took a swing at me with a pipe, but he missed.”

Trevor stiffened.

“I wasn't hurt,” Dan quickly added.

“This time.” Panic showed in Trevor's eyes, the fear of harm coming to someone he loved. The unspoken
What if?

“This time, yes. Next time I'll be more careful.”

Trevor shook his head. “You sound like a kid who just missed being hit by a car on his bike. How do you know you'll be more careful next time?”

Dan wanted to say that next time he wouldn't go tramping around the ruins of a burnt-out building without using his flashlight, or even that he wouldn't go at night, but it was just as likely that he would eventually find himself in some sort of danger. He couldn't avoid it forever.

“I know because I've got you and Ked to think about. I wouldn't want to lose you.”

He reached for Trevor's hand and pressed it against his lips. Trevor gave him a slight smile: The Bogey Man Averted. For now, at least.

There was an intertwining of limbs as they sought each other. Before anything could be decided, fatigue took over and desire backed down. After a few minutes of cuddling and stroking, Trevor fell asleep. His grip loosened on Dan's biceps, the fingers straying across his chest.

Dan listened to Trevor's breathing. His mind was still in the grip of images gleaned earlier in the evening,
pulling him back to the discovery at the slaughterhouse. None of it made sense without knowing why his client had been targeted. Assuming the dead man was Darryl Hillary, of course. He fell asleep with those thoughts in his head and Trevor snoring softly beside him. The alarm woke him three hours later.

The Rue Morgue

Still wearing his dressing gown, Dan stepped onto the back patio, coffee in one hand and newspaper in the other. The sun was bright; the air hung heavy with humidity. It already felt more like 35 Celsius than the mere 29 degrees the forecasters were predicting. Another hot one.

The paper carried an update about a sporadic series of garage fires in the city. They'd carried on through the summer. Just when you thought they were over, another popped up. Always garages, always in the middle of the night, but so far no injuries. Someone wanted to give the residents a good scare. Or maybe they simply wanted to add to the city's growing pains, tossing panic alongside transit confusion and the cacophony of languages as different cultures were set side by side.
Let the city go up in flames
, Dan thought. There were more pressing issues afoot.

He sipped from his mug and mulled over the events of the previous evening. The images presented themselves in chilling precision, from leaving his house to finally driving away from the slaughterhouse nearly two hours later, along with everything else that happened
in between.

A knock interrupted his reveries. He opened the door to find an eager young courier beaming at him like there was no tomorrow and he loved his job delivering packages to strangers more than anything else on earth.
At least there's one happy person in the world this morning
, Dan thought. He signed the electronic pad and looked at the envelope. It was the file he'd ordered on Darryl Hillary.

He pulled open the tetra-pack and glanced quickly over the contents. It was a thin file. Was that all a man's life added up to when all was said and done? He set it on the hallway shelf to peruse later, if he still needed to — which he was beginning to doubt — and went back out to the porch.

He was holding off, but the call had to be made. The hardest part of his job was letting a client know of the death of a loved one. Dan's task was to locate people who had gone missing, not guarantee them safe passage home, especially if they were already dead before he came looking. He also knew the possibility of death must have occurred to most, if not all of the clients who hired him. There had to be long, dark nights when the knock never came at the door, when the phone failed to ring or the letter didn't fall into the post box. There had to be empty hours sitting and wondering:
What if…?
At some point you would have to sit back and ask yourself:
Was my missing mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife or child still out there?
It had to occur to them.

There were plenty of times when Dan wondered how much of what his clients told him was the truth. All of it? Half? Or just the bare minimum they felt he needed to track someone down? What wasn't he being told by the obese, balding man covered in tattoos
asking him to find his wife? What was the story behind the anorexic-looking mother wanting him to
locate her teenage daughter? Often the tales were notably devoid of personal details. Darryl Hillary's severed ear, for instance. What did it signify? Had Hillary overheard something that cost him his life? Could the missing ear be a warning to future snitches to think twice before opening their mouths? What had he known? On the other hand, it might be the trademark of a gang slaying, a mutilation branding this as the work of a particular group anxious to leave their mark in more ways than one. Then again, the guy was hardly gang member material. His sister had said he was a pothead, but he was also a poet. That didn't spell anger and violence, unless his poetry turned in the realm of gangster rappers.

Behind all this, Dan's greatest fear was that he might inadvertently return someone to a scenario that would lead to further harm on the missing person's part. What if the reason for running away was to escape abuse? What if restoring someone to his or her family led to suicide or murder? What if, what if, and again what if? These were the questions that haunted him.

Dan knew he wasn't the only one with such thoughts weighing heavily on him. Similar doubts clouded the minds of some of the best police officers he'd met and worked with. They lived with the knowledge that locating a missing person in time could mean the difference between life and death. All too often the crucial hours slipped by because of negligence of one sort or another. Paperwork not done in time, messages not forwarded, subtler clues overlooked in favour of more obvious ones that led nowhere. Sometimes an outdated photograph meant a face wouldn't be recognized immediately. Or it might be the neighbour not questioned soon enough to prevent a twelve-year-old from being suffocated and stuffed into a green garbage bag inside a refrigerator in a rooming house on the street where she'd vanished a week earlier. It was the stuff of nightmares come alive: lions prowling in the streets, tanks rolling down hills into your village. There was always a fear that the one thing overlooked, the simplest effort not made, or the question left unasked meant someone would die or that a killer would escape. That was not far off the truth.

He'd talked to such cops. “There is no such thing as closure,” they'd told him. “You can dehumanize things on the surface, but not deep down. You want to cut off the feelings, but you can't.” They talked of
vics
and
perps
, not real people. They obsessed over physical details and tried to forget the names and faces, but their own faces marked them as haunted. Dan saw it. “You have to detach yourself,” they told him. “You have to look at things objectively.” But not one ever told him they'd been successful at it.

These bustling, over-exuberant tough guys and gals were all live-wired inside. Scarred by what they'd seen, their emotions caught in a precarious tightrope over an abyss, they walked and sometimes they fell. Like Constable Brian Lawrie, who left the force ten days after pulling the body of Sharin' Keenan Morningstar from the refrigerator of a rooming house in the Annex. For him it was “one crime scene too many,” after being struck by how shiny her hair was when he found her stuffed in that garbage bag. Or his partner, Detective Mike Pedley, who followed the trail of her killer for years, always feeling himself just one step behind until he threw himself under the wheels of a subway train at Rosedale Station on an otherwise bright, upbeat sunny day.

Dan knew the men and women who worked on child murder cases were a breed apart, to use a cliché still deserved in many ways. “It's the living you have to worry about, not the dead,” they said, if only to convince themselves. They referred to human remains as “trash” in an effort to make it less hurtful. “No offence intended to the deceased,” they said. “We just can't take it personally.” Dan understood. It was the language they used, but it was slight as far as armour went. He thought about the boy he'd been, the one who grew up tortured because he didn't know what to feel on hearing of his own mother's death, hating himself because at four he'd been calculating the advantages he might gain in sympathy from others rather than feeling sorry for her. There was always that particular brand of torture.

Dan's other great fear was of making the opposite kind of mistake. Of declaring the wrong person dead or, worse, speaking too soon and declaring the wrong person still alive. His gut instinct told him he'd found Darryl Hillary rather than some other unfortunate as he stared up at the body hanging from a meat hook, but logic told him not to jump to conclusions. In this case it might simply mean delaying the delivery of bad news another day, if bad news it turned out to be. One more day for Darryl Hillary's sister to live in hope. Was that such a bad thing? Sometimes
not
seeing was believing. Often, the relatives of victims preferred not to learn the truth, to go on believing their loved one was still in the land of the living even when all the evidence, forensic and otherwise, told a different story.

He took a last sip of coffee and looked down at his phone, his thumb rolling through the listings till he found the number for Darlene Hillary.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Ms. Hillary?”

“Darlene, yes.”

“It's Dan Sharp.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You found Darryl?”

“I don't know yet. That's why I'm calling.”

The voice turned hard. “What does that mean?”

“It means the man I found hasn't been identified yet.”

“I don't understand. Oh, you mean he's ...”

Dan felt the weariness overtake him. “A body has been found, but no identification has been made.”

“He's dead then.”

The voice sounded like a sack of wet cement hitting the ground. Dan sensed the instinctive clenching, the withdrawal that occurred when the news was bad. She was remarkably contained.

“I prefer not to jump to conclusions. We don't know for sure, so there's still reason to hope.” He paused to let that sink in. “I was wondering if you would know the name of Darryl's dentist. I'd like to get his dental records to see if we can rule out the possibility that it is your brother.”

There was a hesitation. “I'm sorry, I can't think straight. You want to know Darryl's dentist's name?”

“Yes, if you know it.”

“I don't think he had one. Not in Toronto.”

A total recluse
, Dan thought.

“What about before that? A childhood dentist maybe?”

“There was a dentist in Timmins. We both went to him. But that was years ago.”

“The records could still help us.”

She was suddenly suspicious. “Who is ‘us'?”

“The Toronto police.” He pulled his dressing gown tighter.

Another pause. “I don't know if he's still alive. The dentist, I mean.”

“It's worth a try,” Dan said, shielding his face from the sun with his hand.

“Just a minute and I'll see if I can find my old address book.”

He heard her shuffling off. He sipped his coffee and waited. She returned in less than a minute.

“I have it here,” she said. “I keep everything.”

As she relayed the information in a halting voice, Dan wrote down the particulars.

“I'm sorry I have to ask,” he said, “but you mentioned that Darryl smoked drugs. As far as you know, does your brother have drug debts?”

“I don't think he has anything like that. I know he liked to smoke marijuana once in a while, but I don't think he was mixed up in anything like that.”

He thanked her and hung up then called directory assistance in Timmins. The operator was unable to locate the dentist in question. She offered to look back several years till she found the name. Not much to do, Dan concluded, accepting her offer to help. The answer came quickly enough: the number had been delisted ten years previously.

He'd just clapped his cellphone closed when it rang again. He saw the name
Hillary
on his screen.

“He has a gold cap,” she declared without preamble. “I just thought of it. It's on one of the lower front teeth. You can't really see it much except when he smiles. I hope that helps you.”

“Yes, it's a great help,” Dan said, trying to picture the dangling monster smiling at him. It was an eerie thought. Or maybe the gold tooth had been removed along with the left ear. Perhaps it was a psychopathic gold prospector the police should be looking for. “With any luck, it should tell us what we need to know. Thank you very much.”

He finished his coffee without any further interruptions then went inside to dress.

The Centre of Forensic Sciences on Grosvenor Street was the largest laboratory of its kind in Canada. At any given moment, it employed more than two hundred and fifty personnel. Its slogan was
Scientia pro justicia
: “Science for justice.” Working neither for the law nor against it, the centre was supposed to be as impartial as death. At any rate, that was its claim.

Dan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the coolness of a wall. His stomach, no longer grateful for the late-night Wendy's combo, had been rumbling for the past hour, demanding breakfast while the rest of him just wanted to go back to sleep. In the main-floor bathroom, he rinsed his face with cool water and surveyed the rugged landscape that constituted his features: jagged nose, brooding eyes under dark brows, broad cheekbones, and powerful chin. A red sickle ran from below the right eye up to his temple, arresting the viewer's gaze before granting permission to go further. It was a lasting gift from his father for coming home from school late when Dan was ten.

He pulled on the paper towels. At first they refused to give way before giving way far too easily and flooding the floor with brown sheets folded in half. He stooped to pick them up and left them on the counter for the next person who came along, presuming that person wouldn't be too picky about his drying towels. After all, you never knew where they'd been.

He came back out and sat in reception. A clock ticked at the far end of the hall. Somnolent, hypnotic, it was a reminder to the living of what no longer existed for the dead arrayed for viewing one floor below. He stared at it, his gaze blanking dully before the numbers registered.

Time.

Clock.

Morning.

He'd left the slaughterhouse seven hours ago. Three hours before that he'd been passing a quiet night with Trevor and Ked until it got interrupted. Was it not ironic to be sitting in the hallway of the Toronto morgue waiting to meet a corpse after spending the evening watching
The Exorcist
?

He stood and paced. Sitting was out of the question if he wanted to stay awake. A green brochure on a magazine stand caught his eye. He scanned the shiny chrome tables on the cover, turned the page and browsed the paragraphs outlining the manufacturer's specifications for modular mortuaries. He'd never heard of such things.

Fascinated, he read the jaunty, upbeat descriptions of “stand-alone, self-contained plant rooms” that would prove “ideal for any contemporary disaster situation.” The rooms in the images were pristine. No bodies under sheets, no trails of blood or dismembered limbs lying on the floor. No doctors and nurses running around with worn expressions as the body count from the latest suicide bombing or train wreck piled up, proving just how far from ideal any contemporary disaster situation was likely to be.