Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (68 page)

“But Mike, I have to go back to Carillon Street tomorrow. I ran into complete stonewalling today. None of the neighbours saw a thing. In fact, no one can remember ever seeing the occupant of room 2C.”

“Maybe that’s true.”

“And maybe I’m the Queen of England. I figure a visit bright and early in the morning before they’ve had time to get too seriously into the sauce, I might get fewer faulty memories. Give it to Watts and Charbonneau, their manslaughter just took a guilty plea.”

Inwardly, Green grimaced. Watts and Charbonneau were standard-issue detectives, long on plod but short on imagination. Cases with twisty trails were beyond the agility of their brains. “I’d even do it myself,” he muttered, “but I’m stuck in that smoke and mirrors—I mean geographic profiling thing.”

“Hey, don’t knock that. I’m planning to use it to study the pattern of muggings in the east end.”

Green nodded with what he hoped looked like encouragement. In truth, he had no quarrel with geographic profiling. Like behavioural profiling, in the hands of an intelligent investigator, it helped narrow down the search, so that the proverbial needle was in a far smaller haystack. What bothered him was spending precious hours showing off a new toy when he’d rather be out grappling with a real live case. So he tried another approach.

“There’s a remote chance this might be connected to your John Doe anyway and save you plowing through all those tattoos. Plus you get to butt heads with Josh Bleustein.”

“Bleustein? Now for sure I don’t want—” Sullivan started to protest, but broke off when Green plunked Bleustein’s address down on his desk. Rarely did Green actually pull rank on him, but there were times like this one, where despite their friendship, his authority was implicit.

Despite her misgivings, Sharon’s curiosity got the better of her on the way home and lured her on a short detour past the house in Highland Park. She cruised slowly around the neighbourhood and parked outside for a few minutes, soaking up impressions. Her first reaction was one of horror, followed by intrigue and finally a begrudging twinge of hope. The house was in wild disarray; lilacs heavy with blooms choked half the yard, and a massive maple towered ominously over the roof. The parts of the house that could actually be seen through the underbrush all seemed to need replacing, from the curling roof shingles to the sagging veranda and the grimy windows. It would cost a fortune. Yet the street was quiet, and the small park on the next block had a play structure and benches beneath the graceful boughs of gnarled old trees.

She wasn’t going to admit it to Mike yet, but the place had potential. All they had to do was win the lottery.

The clock on the dash of her Chevy Cavalier read six-thirty by the time she finally picked up Tony from the sitter, dropped by the grocery store and reached their little home. No Corolla. No Green. “Schmuck,” she muttered, thinking of the sweltering house, the dinner to be prepared and a crabby baby to be fed before she could even consider resting her tired feet.

She heard the phone ring before she’d even reached the front door. Swearing, she plunked Tony and the diaper bag down on the front step while she scrounged in her purse for the keys. Two rings. She found her keys and wrestled with the lock. Three rings. She shoved the door open, swooped up her son and dashed into the kitchen to snatch up the phone just before the answering machine kicked in. If it was her husband, he was going to get an earful.

It was Leslie Black. Apologetic, agitated, tripping all over herself. Most unlike the Leslie Black Sharon knew. Leslie said she’d spent the last two hours worrying, because she couldn’t leave things as Emmerson-Jones insisted they be left. Not if Matt Fraser’s life were in danger, or indeed someone else’s, as unlikely as that seemed.

Jamming the phone into the crook of her neck, Sharon dumped her son on the kitchen floor, where he instantly began to shriek. She opened the fridge and began to hunt for some cheese.

“Sharon?” Leslie prompted into the clamour. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude at the crazy hour.”

“You’re not,” Sharon said hastily. “My son has just become very definite about his wants these days. Like his father. But I’m listening.” She cut up some cubes of cheese, and through Tony’s clamour she tried to focus on Leslie’s voice. The woman was clearly worried.

“Matt may have been further over the edge than I thought. When he told the group he would have to put a stop to this harassment, I told your husband I thought he meant a restraining order. And maybe he did. But I’ve been reviewing my notes and replaying the session in my head, and there was definitely a creepy flavour to it. Matt’s a very quiet-spoken guy, he doesn’t ever show much affect, but there was an eerie intensity to his words. He didn’t look at me—he rarely does maintain eye contact for long—but he was inspecting his hands. Of course, Dr. Emmerson-Jones dismisses any notion of the subconscious, but to me it looked like subconsciously Matt was relaying a message to his hands. To his fists.”

Tony ran out of cheese, and Sharon rummaged in the cupboard for a cookie to silence him long enough for her to consider Leslie’s theory. It was a bit too fanciful even for her clinical sense, but she’d seen too many bizarre twists to the human psyche in her ten years in psychiatry to discount it completely.

“What about his thinking? Do you think he was paranoid?”

“He was definitely paranoid,” Leslie said without the earlier doubt in her voice. “But I put that down to some type of posttraumatic stress reaction. Traumatized people see threat or danger in the most innocuous event and interpret ambiguous or neutral behaviour as negative. After what happened ten years ago, Matt has always seen condemnation or retaliation in the least little thing. If someone bumps into him in a grocery store or looks at him twice, he thinks they know. He doesn’t trust anyone, and he sees himself as an easy scapegoat. And really, till we’ve walked in his shoes, we can’t judge how paranoid he should be, can we? The whole world hates a sex offender, and a pedophile is the lowest of the low. It doesn’t matter that he was acquitted. People remember the accusation and don’t believe the acquittal. He’s a permanent pariah, and emotionally Matt was never equipped to be a pariah.”

Sharon looked at Tony’s big trusting brown eyes and his dimpled cheeks, at the mop of chocolate curls and the gooey cookie clutched in his fist. She felt a rush of protective love. “On the other hand, you can hardly blame people. An acquittal doesn’t mean innocence. It means reasonable doubt. Would that be enough for you? Would you let him around your own children?”

“Absolutely. At least as far as the risk of pedophilia is concerned. But as far as the paranoia business…” Her certainty began to fade. “I’m not sure I could trust him. Matt felt trapped. He felt betrayed. And deep down, I think he had an incredible amount of rage. That’s what scares me.”

Sharon knew little about the case or about Matt Fraser himself, but she knew what could happen when a shy, timid man felt cornered, or nurtured a rage deep inside for ten years.

It was a chilling scenario, except for one small point. “But if he was guilty of the molestation and got away with it, he’d have a whole different set of emotions,” she said. “Then every funny look or small slight would be a reminder of what he in his heart knew to be true. Surely he wouldn’t feel angry or betrayed. Trapped and cornered, perhaps, but mainly by his own guilt and shame. If he has a normal conscience, that is,” she added, remembering that many pedophiles do not see themselves as villains but as lovers of children giving natural expression to that love. Lost in these thoughts, she became slowly aware of the silence at the other end of the line.

“Leslie?”

“I don’t think he’s guilty,” Leslie replied, so softly Sharon barely heard her. “Sharon, you must never tell anyone that I told you this. Neither Dr. Emmerson-Jones nor I think he’s guilty. Matt had a sexual behaviours assessment, you see. When he came back to Ottawa three years ago, when his life was falling apart and he was sinking further and further into his panic attacks and paranoia, he went to his doctor and asked for a referral to Dr. Pelham. He said he needed someone to believe him, to prove to the world that he wasn’t aroused by children. So he took Pelham’s tests.”

“You mean with the plesthmograph and the whole bit?”

“Yes. And he passed.”

“I don’t remember any news about that,” Sharon said. “Did he tell anyone?”

“No. That was the odd thing. Dr. Emmerson-Jones and I only learned it because we read it in his file. Sharon, I’m telling you this because I don’t know what to do, and I’m scared to be the only one who knows.”

Now it was Sharon’s turn to be silent. Although she had never worked in the forensic unit at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, she knew the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Pelham’s reputation as an expert in sexual deviance. He had provided testimony at countless trials across the country on the sexual proclivities of accused men, which he assessed not merely by skilled interviewing and standardized questionnaires but by measuring the amount of blood flow to their penises in response to pictures and stories depicting different sexual themes. Matt Fraser had willingly submitted himself to the humiliating experience of having his erections measured while he looked at pictures of all sorts, including children. It would be like opening the curtain on his most intimate, private dream world. Why would he do that seven years later, when he’d already been acquitted? When people had begun to forget.

Was it to prove his innocence once and for all, or more sinisterly, to add further weight to his deception? Sharon didn’t know if the test results could be faked, or if treatment in the interim could have suppressed the urges. He had been away for several years; maybe he had secretly enrolled himself in a treatment program where he’d learned to control his fantasies, and then returned in the hope of clearing his name beyond all doubt.

In which case, why had he told no one? Surely, with his deep-rooted cynicism, he would not have trusted others to get the message out through word of mouth or staff room gossip. Regardless of whether he was truly innocent or guilty, he should have trumpeted this finding from the rooftops. Something didn’t make sense, but before she revealed any of this news to Mike, she needed to doublecheck the whole story. Because if what Leslie said was accurate, then Mike might need to look in an entirely different direction and possibly for an entirely different crime.

“Leslie, would you do me a big favour?” she asked on impulse. “Could you requisition his file tomorrow and let me have a peek at it?”

There was utter silence at the end of the line. Inwardly Sharon cringed, for she knew what she was asking. Her request violated every mantra of confidentiality they’d ever been taught to recite. Leslie would not only have to go out on a limb, she’d be twisting in the wind.

“I know it’s asking a lot,” Sharon added as the silence lengthened. “I promise I won’t ever let on how I got the file, but it’s important.”

“I have to think about it,” Leslie replied. “I’ll call you at noon tomorrow.”

Six

Trying to be unobtrusive,
Green inched his sleeve up to sneak another peek at his watch. Superintendent Jules had placed him at the head table so that the thirty-five pairs of eager middle management eyes seemed to catch his every move. For the occasion, Green had even put on a proper suit, which bunched at his crotch and pulled across his back. His tie chafed, and despite the frigid climate control of the windowless conference room, perspiration beaded his brow.

An OPP officer droned on in a dusty monotone as he led the group through a series of computer slides on the pattern of drug crimes in the Province of Ontario. The lights were dim, adding to the challenge of staying awake.

Green’s watch read 10:22. An hour and a half until lunch, but only eight minutes until break time. Thank God. No doubt Sullivan had already finished his canvass of the streets around the rooming house, and with any luck he was just winding up his visit to Josh Bleustein. One quick phone call to Sullivan during the break, and Green could be back in his seat at the head of the table before anyone noticed he’d gone.

The lights came on and a buzz of conversation rose around the table. Spotting an inspector from Montreal plowing a path towards him, Green jumped to his feet and brandished his cellphone as if to imply he had an urgent matter to attend to. He took the stairs two at a time on his way to the privacy of his office, but when he reached the Major Crimes squad room, he stopped short. Sullivan was already back at his desk, hunched over his computer.

“What are you doing here?” Green demanded. “I wanted you to see Bleustein ASAP .”

Sullivan straightened slowly from the keyboard, and Green had the sense he was counting to ten. Green knew tact was not always his strong point, but the fifteen-minute break was slowly ticking away. He held back his impatience.

“Bleustein threw me out,” Sullivan replied. “Barely let me in the door. ‘That’s attorney-client privilege, Sergeant! You should be ashamed of yourself.’”

“Did you tell him Fraser was missing?”

“Of course I did. Attorney-client privilege was all I got back.”

“But—”

“I tried everything I could, Green, and that’s what I got. A goddamn giant clam.”

“He knows something. Fraser’s been to see him, and whatever it was about, Fraser wanted nothing to do with the police.”

“I didn’t get that impression. I think old Josh Bleustein was just getting a big charge out of being obstructive.”

“In that case, he better be prepared for round two, with me. And he might be sorry he wasn’t nicer to you.” Green glanced at his watch irritably. Two hours minimum before he could get away. Two more hours of beady middle management eyes and droning lists of names, photos and stats. Still, he could use that time to figure out how he was going to tackle Josh Bleustein, all the while appearing to listen to the speaker with rapt attention. An art he’d perfected years ago in the back row of his high school classrooms.

Sullivan grinned. He was built like a bear, six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier that Green, and at first glance he might appear the more threatening of the two, but only to those who didn’t know Green. “And when are you going to fit in this rematch?”