Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (104 page)

“I suppose. Still, it helps to know that, psychologically, suicide is possible. Even likely.” He ceded the point reluctantly. “Much more likely than murder, twenty years later when his family had all moved away, and no one even knew he was in town.”

She nodded, emitting an appreciative sigh as she took another sip. “There is an in-between possibility, you know. If he suffered from paranoid delusions, he might believe others were out to get him. Instruments of the devil, or something. I had a patient once who genuinely believed I was a witch, and she was terrified of me.” She shivered. “That was scary.”

He leaned forward, his own tea forgotten. “So what’s your in-between theory?”

“Well, simply that something scared him so much he jumped off the tower to escape.”

“Something? You mean someone.” His thoughts were racing back to the crime scene, to the scrap of fabric on the wrong side of the wall.

“Who knows? Perhaps something he saw—or someone— triggered his fear. Or perhaps it was all just a hallucination. Remember, by this time he was getting pretty sick.”

Green struggled through fatigue to grapple with the elusive speculations she was tossing out. So much hinged on Lawrence’s mental state, but as Sharon said, no one could ever really know that. He grabbed onto the facts he had. “But his group home supervisor said with the meds he’d been on, he might still be in fairly good shape.”

She shook her head dubiously. “In good shape for him, honey. But some schizophrenics are hit worse than others, and he sounds like one of the sicker ones. His illness struck him early in his teens—a bad sign—and he had to have electroshock, which is a drastic treatment normally used as a last resort. Plus it’s unusual for St. Lawrence to keep someone hospitalized for almost twenty years. He’d have to be resistant to almost all the treatments they tried, and they had to think he presented a serious ongoing risk.”

“Risk to what?”

“To himself. Or to others.”

“What if his parents just didn’t want him to ever get out?”

She shook her head. “You know as well as I do that they don’t have that power. Especially before Brian’s Law came out in 2000. Lawrence couldn’t have been held indefinitely against his wishes.”

Green himself had been a detective on the major crimes squad when popular Ottawa sports broadcaster Brian Smith had been shot dead by a schizophrenic who had refused treatment. The outrage of the community had spilled into the legislature as well, making it easier for doctors to force treatment on those without the power to judge wisely for themselves. But it was still a difficult feat unless the patient consented.

“What if he wanted to be kept in too?”

“He’d still have to be pretty sick, Mike. A lot of patients are afraid to leave hospital because it’s the only home they know. But part of the staff ’s job is to help them get ready.”

He pondered the situation. The vague, uneasy feeling he’d had earlier after discussing the past with Sandy and his mother began to crystallize. “What if he did something really horrific?”

“He’d have gone to a forensic facility.”

“Only if people found out.” He sat forward excitedly. “Bear with me, honey. See if you see the same thing I do.” He picked up a set of Tony’s playing cards from the table and began to talk, laying them down, one for each point, as if arraying his forces.

“First we have the father lecturing about Satan and using the strap to drive evil out of his boys’ lives. Second, we have at least two older brothers engaging in sex and other sins. Third, we have a boy spying on his brothers and believing he’s the agent of God’s will. Fourth, we have this same sick boy believing he can purify souls by bizarre blood rituals. And finally, we have a brother who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. You add to all this the fact that the family put Lawrence away for good, they burned down the shed he loved, they threw out all his things, the father and brother became drunks, and the mother killed herself.”

By the end, Sharon was sitting straight up, wide awake. “Something horrific, you said. What, Mike? What exactly are you thinking?”

As she posed the question, Green looked at his six cards and recognized the uneasiness that had been lurking in the back of his mind. About Sophia, Derek, blood-stained notes and the jacket that was torn on the wrong place.

“I think he may have killed his brother,” he said. “And maybe somebody wanted revenge.”

Nine

 T
he next morning, much to his own surprise, Green was already in his office on the phone before Brian Sullivan even arrived at work. Sullivan usually arrived at the first hint of dawn, freshly scrubbed and sunny. Today he lumbered over to his desk an hour late, balancing his coffee and turning on his computer before he’d even shed his coat. He looked like a man who’d rather be somewhere else.

Green beckoned him through his open door, then held up his hand for silence as a voice finally came on the line. He had reached St. Lawrence Hospital’s administrator before she’d even showered from her morning jog, and she was not pleased. She had an entire day of labour negotiations booked for that day, she informed him, and had absolutely no time to speak to the police. No need, Green assured her blithely. When my detectives arrive, they will only need to speak to the physician in charge of Lawrence Pettigrew’s care and to the staff who treated him, as well as examine his file. The woman sputtered about confidentiality and privacy laws, but again Green was ready for her. You will have the necessary paperwork, he replied with more conviction than he felt. Legally, it was unclear who was Lawrence’s official next-of-kin, given his father’s current mental state, but Green hoped that Robbie Pettigrew’s signature together with Sullivan’s Irish charm would do the trick.

After Green hung up, Sullivan fixed him with bloodshot eyes over the rim of his Tim Hortons coffee, looking very short on Irish charm. “You’re not still serious about the Brockville goose chase.”

Green bristled but sidestepped the ill humour. Everyone was entitled to a bad day. “Now more than ever.”

“Mike, I’ve got work backed up the wazoo.”

“I’ll fix it. The visit has three main purposes, but whatever else you can dig up, hey, that’s gravy. First, find out if Lawrence had a history of violence, either when he was admitted twenty years ago or during his stay. Second, find out if he ever talked about returning home and why. Third, bring the supervisor Angie Hogencamp up here to confirm the ID.”

Sullivan nodded, tossed back the last of his coffee and lobbed the cup over Green’s desk, nailing his waste basket dead centre. “Gibbs says you also mentioned going to Toronto. Seems like an awful lot of manhours for a case MacPhail called a probable self-inflicted.”

“I’m not convinced it was self-inflicted. Besides, it’s not just Lawrence’s death I’m concerned about. It’s the older brother’s disappearance.”

"And you think...what?” Green shrugged. With Sullivan in this mood, there was no way he was going to share his tenuous theory. “I’m still putting the pieces together.”

Sullivan stuck his foot out and kicked Green’s door shut. “The guy took a dive, Green. End of case. It’s a case I could have handled with my eyes shut. I just asked you along for the ride in the country. The guys out in the sticks grumble that the central brass don’t give a damn. They’ve had four different inspectors out there in the past year. I didn’t expect you to turn it into a major investigation!”

“Then you’ve forgotten who I am.”

Sullivan raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if appealing for patience. “No, I haven’t fucking forgotten. But I’ve got a stack of other cases out on my desk which I have to assign. I’m the officer of record on this case, so I’d appreciate knowing all the facts. I won’t walk into an interview with a bunch of hospital tight asses without knowing exactly why I’m there.”

The two stared each other down. Green was the first to look away, not because Sullivan was tougher, but because he was right. As Green summarized his discussion with Sharon, Sullivan listened with an expression that betrayed nothing. But at the end he shook his head.

“Green, that’s absolute bullshit.”

Green flushed. He knew it was a tenuous theory, especially in the sober light of second thought, and he hadn’t had time to plug all its holes, but he had hoped for a more open reception. “Something terrible happened, Brian,” he repeated doggedly. “And the family tried to erase all signs of it.”

Sullivan shook his head incredulously. “I’ve seen some weird family shit in my career, and not much of what people do surprises me any more. But I grew up in a big family, remember? Five boys, two girls. And I can tell you if the crazy one murdered the family hero, there’s no way any of us would have protected him. If we didn’t kill him ourselves, we’d sure as hell turn him in.”

Green pondered that problem. Being an only child, he couldn’t fully grasp the dynamics of a large family or the notion of conflicting loyalties, but he could imagine the anguish the Pettigrew family had endured in making their decision. He groped ahead, trying to put himself in their shoes.

“But Lawrence was also one of their own. They knew he was crazy and wasn’t responsible for his actions. Or it could have been fear of all the publicity, the protracted pain of a trial, the shame of insanity in the family or even the gossip in the small town. Who the hell knows! I just think they chose their own private form of justice, and they made sure Lawrence would never, ever be free.”

Sullivan was still scowling, but this time his tone was less dismissive. “But you don’t have a body, Green. You don’t even have people wondering if there’s a body.”

“We’ve got a suspicious disappearance. Derek Pettigrew has dropped off the radar screen.”

“Didn’t the drunk—Tom—didn’t he hear from him?”

“We have only his word on that. He was twenty at the time of the blow-up, so he could have been part of the cover-up. Besides, this historic murder could tie into the death we are investigating. If Lawrence did kill Derek, then there might be a line-up of people wanting to pay him back. Hell, the whole goddamn village might know who did it, and they aren’t planning to tell us a thing!”

“Mike, if the family was going to kill him, they’d have done it right then and there, not waited twenty years!”

“Things change,” Green countered, not sure he had an explanation himself, nor a decent list of suspects. “The kids were young, the parents were alive, maybe the revenge took twenty years to fester before something triggered it.”

Sullivan frowned. “You’re talking about Tom.”

“Or Robbie.”

“Robbie was eight years old!”

“And now he’s twenty-eight—a disillusioned, damaged young man whose childhood was ruined and who is now quite strong enough to throw the culprit off that tower.”

“But Robbie barely remembered Lawrence!”

“So he says,” Green countered. “But remember how he never mentioned Lawrence when we interviewed him? And I don’t remember seeing a single photo of Lawrence in that album, which is why we forgot to ask about him.”

Sullivan looked as if he’d been flattened by a steamroller. Which perhaps he had, thought Green ruefully. He held up a conciliatory hand. “I’m not saying it happened, Brian. I’m not saying Lawrence was even murdered. I’m just saying we still have unanswered questions, and we shouldn’t be closing the case till we’ve answered them. So your first step is to confirm that the dead body is actually Lawrence and then to find out all you can about what happened twenty years ago that led to his committal.”

Sullivan rubbed his square hand over his cropped blonde hair, making it stand on end. Green, who was familiar with his every move, knew he was about to cave. “Mike,” Sullivan said in a weary, last-ditch effort. “This is a goddamn fishing expedition. We can’t even get to the murders we have bodies for, let alone one that the family is denying ever happened.”

Green hesitated, reluctant to add more wild speculation to Sullivan’s already overloaded plate. “Maybe that’s because they’re hiding something more,” he muttered.

“What?”

This time Green didn’t respond. He was thinking of the two love letters in different handwriting, of a beautiful blackhaired girl who had left town at the same time. He had only the vaguest fear of what might have happened to her, but it was too early to even voice it aloud.

“Suit yourself,” Sullivan muttered finally, thrusting his chair back to stand up. He was too much of a professional to sulk, but Green watched with dismay as he strode across the room to snatch his jacket off his chair. There was an anger to his movements that went far beyond the minor spat they’d had. Behind closed doors, they often shed their disparate ranks and argued about a case, just as they had in the old days together in the field. But their disputes rarely bubbled over into the more personal sphere.

Green sat at his desk fearing what was at the root of Sullivan’s mood. The station was alive with rumours about promotions and a major shake-up in assignments. Sullivan had been a sergeant for seven years, but in recent years his hopes of rising higher had always been thwarted by politics. Besides being an anglophone with only rudimentary French, Sullivan was a white male at a time when that was a major roadblock to promotional hopes.

Green wondered if Sullivan had heard something that he, Green, had not. Green was often the last to hear the rumours; all his ambitious middle management colleagues knew he was content to stay where he was, anxious to avoid being promoted any further, and utterly useless as an ally or co-conspirator in the climb up the ladder. He had an anxious thought that the Deputy Chief might even be planning to move him to a totally different posting like District Inspector, where he’d be expected to oversee patrol operations about which he knew absolutely nothing. Banishing that crazy thought from his head, he phoned Ident to ask if they’d made any progress on the fingerprints, either on the ladder or on the bloody note.

“Green, I’d tell you if there was,” Cunningham exclaimed. “You want any old answer, or do you want the right one? I’ve got a dozen cases on the go here.”