Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (82 page)

He wanted to prove his own invincibility, but the fifteen minutes had barely elapsed before he found himself flagging. His tongue tripped on words, and his limbs grew heavy. Humbled, he cradled his second cup of French roast in his palms and went back to the sofa.

“You made the headlines,” Sharon remarked, settling into the armchair with her coffee and the paper. “Lots of gory photos of the police cruiser and your poor little car.”

He reached for the paper, hoping the photo would jumpstart his brain, but all he could make out was the front hood of the mangled Corolla. “Fuck,” he muttered. “The insurance probably won’t pay a damn cent for that accident. Personal car used in the line of duty. Damn...” He rested his head wearily against the cushions, picturing the money swirling down the drain. “I’d better call Dad before he sees that picture. Can you bring me the phone?”

When Sid Green heard his voice, there was silence on the phone. Then a whispered. “Thanks to God.
Nu
, Mishkeleh, you don’t look where you are going?”

“It couldn’t be helped, Dad, but I’m okay. Everyone is okay.”

“That woman you hit. She’s not okay, and they said on the news her husband is a big lawyer.”

Through the blankness of his memory, Green felt a stab of worry. What if he had hit Anne? What if his own recklessness had been responsible for permanent damage? “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to charge me,” he said, praying he was right. “It was an unlucky accident. And Dad? If reporters come bugging you, don’t talk to them, okay? Let me handle it.”

With a few more reassurances, he disconnected, handed the phone back to Sharon and slumped back in the pillows. Worry gnawed at him. “Any news on Anne Patterson in the paper?”

“Her name’s being withheld at the request of the family—”

“Which means Quinton Patterson. As always, trying to do damage control. Nothing in there about him suing me?”

Sharon paused to scrutinize the article. “Not as of last night. Apparently, they hadn’t located all the family. Sounds as if the daughter hasn’t turned up yet.”

“Yeah, that’s who I was trying to find—” His eyes flew open, and he sat up abruptly as a memory came back. “My God, Hannah! Bring me the phone again.”

“What?” Sharon looked at him in alarm. He shook his head as if to reassure her that he hadn’t lost his faculties and dialled the station. No, said the clerk in Major Crimes, Hannah had never shown up or contacted them yesterday. Green ordered the clerk to put out a new bulletin for everyone to be on the look-out for her. As he hung up, he caught Sharon’s expression, which had changed from alarm to astonishment.

“Hannah is in Ottawa? Your Hannah?”

He held up a soothing hand. “Long story. She has apparently decided to check out her roots.” He dialled another number and waited impatiently through five rings before Ashley’s breathless voice snapped through the line.

“Mike? She there?”

Call display, Green realized, old enough to be disconcerted.

“Not yet. Has she been in touch with you?”

Ashley launched into a tirade about his callous and cavalier attitude and berated him for letting her stew for almost twentyfour hours without so much as a phone call. He held the phone away and massaged his temple, choosing to endure rather than defend himself.

“Something came up,” was all he said.

“Oh, it did, did it? Well, I’m glad to hear some things never change. I hope your new wife appreciates her position on Officer Green’s list of priorities.”

“I promise to update you every hour. I have to go now, but don’t worry, I have the whole police force looking for her. We’ll find her.”

He extricated himself with relief and turned to Sharon, aware of the throbbing in his temple and the coffee churning in his gut. By the time he had finished explaining Hannah’s story, fatigue was steamrolling over him. He prayed that Sharon’s experience with the vagaries of human behaviour would save the day.

“Should I be worried?”

When she shook her head, he wanted to kiss her, but hadn’t the strength to leave the couch. “She’s sixteen, Mike. Lots of kids travel all over at that age, and she sounds like she’s nobody’s fool.”

“Maybe not, but she’s still a middle class kid from the Vancouver suburbs, and if I know Ashley, she’s been pampered to death.”

“Overprotective parents didn’t stop you any.”

True, he thought. As Holocaust survivors, his parents had come by their paranoia honestly, but during his childhood this had not prevented him from breaching the walls of their fear to run wild and free through the rough inner city streets of Lowertown, clashing with the French Canadian youth who controlled the turf. But the memory of himself as a kid brought no reassurance. Teenagers could get themselves in such messes.

He set his coffee aside and leaned back into the pillows. “What should I do? I’ve already got the uniforms keeping an eye out.”

“You could try hiring a sky writer to say ‘Hannah, call your father.’”

He didn’t rise to her laughter. “Some Jewish mother you make.”

“I’m serious, Mike. Hard as it is, you have to wait. She’s circling the landing strip, gathering the courage and getting the lay of the land. She took off on a whim, and now she’s probably wondering what happens next. She’ll turn up once she’s figured out what to do.”

“Can you be home? Stay by the phone?”

She eyed him knowingly. “Yes, I’m staying home with you, remember? Monitoring your concussion.”

He contemplated the current chaos of his situation; Anne Patterson unconscious, Quinton out for his blood, Rebecca Whelan a giant unknown, and his own daughter on the lam in unfamiliar waters. To say nothing of the mystery arsonist who was trying to obliterate all evidence of a past crime.

And worst of all, a dizzying fatigue that made every word an effort. He couldn’t even think which problem to attack first, let alone how, and all he really wanted to do was crawl back under the covers.

Fortunately, at that moment, a familiar old Chevrolet pulled into the drive, and Brian Sullivan climbed out.

Sullivan hadn’t slept well. He’d lain awake in his darkened room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the whir of the air conditioner and the muffled cheep of crickets outside his closed window, chasing futile worries through weary loops in his mind. Green was going to be a wipe-out, perhaps for days, unable to remember things and subject to bouts of fatigue and nausea which would sap him of his usual vim and acuity. It left Sullivan all alone to confront Quinton Patterson and the possible scandal brewing within the force.

Saturday was supposed to be a short shift, and he hoped to spend the afternoon with his boys at the antique air show out at Uplands Military Base. At barely six a.m., as the sun was just skimming the rooftops across the street, he slipped out of the house and headed down to the station for one more peek at Fraser’s file. Perhaps he had missed something yesterday. Perhaps the report on the psychologist’s visit to Barbara Devine was somewhere in Devine’s notes, and he had simply missed it. It was a huge file, with pages of witness statements, reports and interview transcripts. Surely somewhere in Devine’s official records or court briefings there would be a reference to Anne Whelan asking the psychologist to change her story.

There was nothing. There were several neatly prepared official witness statements signed by the psychologist attesting to her initial conversation with Rebecca, as well as photocopies of her rough case notes in which key parts had been highlighted in yellow. Sullivan peered at the highlighted sections closely, trying to decipher them.

Becky very active today, wiggly in seat, trouble sitting still. Says she has go peepee, hurts down there. Touching her panties. How? ‘not supposed to tell.’ Q (n.a.) Q ‘Mr. Fraser’ (looks frightened) Q ‘wouldn’t let me go.’ Report
CAS
The next notation was made at 2:10 p.m. the same day. Report made Jocelyn Marquis,
CAS
intake, referred to case worker, will be in contact. The next notation was at 2:30. Principal R. S. informed, impressed on him need for confidentiality.

Neither the psychologist’s case notes nor her formal statement contained any direct statement implicating Matthew Fraser. She was very careful to report that Becky had made a series of comments about needing to urinate, about her crotch hurting and about Mr. Fraser, but that the connection between the ideas was unclear. Although the psychologist had refrained from asking more questions in order not to compromise the CAS investigation, she felt Becky’s agitated behaviour and her reference to keeping a secret provided reasonable grounds to suspect abuse.

Sullivan flipped through subsequent witness statements and numerous transcripts of interviews, but as he had feared, there was no report in the file to the effect that only days after the initial disclosure, Rebecca’s mother had approached the psychologist and asked her to change her story. And even more damning, the psychologist had not been called to testify for either the prosecution or the defence. The Crown had apparently thought that the testimony of the CAS social worker and that of the investigating police officer were more probative than that of the psychologist, who had already indicated in her statement that the connection between the pain and Fraser was very unclear.

Which should have been music to the defence lawyer’s ears, so why Josh Bleustein had not called her, Sullivan didn’t even like to guess. It certainly lent credibility to Steve Whelan’s supposition that Quinton Patterson and Becky’s mother had carefully orchestrated the evidence to throw the trial without shifting the spotlight to anyone else in the family.

The question was—had Barbara Devine been party to that orchestration? And did he even want to know? He could forget he’d ever heard the story, but if in fact Anne was covering up for her new husband, then he might very well be Matthew Fraser’s killer. And scandal or not, fellow police officer or nor, Sullivan couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.

The simplest way to check the story’s veracity was to ask the psychologist, but doing so might open up a Pandora’s box which no one, not even Green, could shut again if a cover-up were revealed. Sullivan stared morosely into space. Before he did anything irreversible, he needed to meet Anne Patterson herself and probe a little into her past, to judge for himself the type of woman she was.

When he pulled onto the grounds of the Ottawa General Hospital, he spotted a cluster of people on the front lawn and a white van with a local TV station’s logo parked at the curb. With intuition honed from years on the job, he recognized trouble. He parked his unmarked Taurus behind the van, and as he climbed out, his instincts were confirmed. In the centre of the cluster, flanked by the local news reporter and facing the camera resolutely was Quinton Patterson, looking suitably outraged and distraught. He had taken the time to comb his dark curls and throw on a clean shirt, but his eyes were bloodshot and his face dark with stubble.

“I can’t tell you all the details, but I also can’t keep silent any longer,” he was saying. “My wife may never recover. Ten years ago, the justice system failed her, the police failed her, and the man who destroyed our world walked free. How do you reconcile yourself, when the guilty walk free and the innocent are condemned to an eternal hell? How do you reconcile yourself, when the people you trusted betray you and the system you believed in deserts you? The answer...” He paused with a look of infinite sadness, and the ring of people hung on the silence.

“The answer is you can’t. My wife couldn’t. She needed help. She needed compassion and support and someone to erase the pain. I failed to. I know that, and I’ll live with that forever. But at least I tried, and maybe in time with our children slowly healing, I would have succeeded. But this case wouldn’t let her rest, and the police, after their bungling had messed it up in the first place, wouldn’t let her rest. Wouldn’t let her forget or let me take the brunt of their intrusion.”

Patterson leaned forward, his gaze skewering the camera. “Yesterday an Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green turned up on our doorstep—on our own private doorstep, for God’s sake!—to catch my wife off guard, and told her things I’d been shielding her from. And then, not content to let her escape down the street, he chased her, called in the troops as if she was a common criminal, and spooked her so badly she ran right in front of them. I hold Inspector Green personally responsible for the accident, and if my wife dies, I’ll hold him personally responsible for her death. Yes, I hit him. I’d just seen my wife’s mangled body. Yes, I knocked him out. And I’d do it again.”

Sullivan listened with disgust. The camera had never wavered, and the reporter had not said a single word. She was clearly a rookie and no match for the slick and practised legal orator. She had simply given Patterson his soap box and allowed him to do what he did best—sell a case to the jury. To the jury sitting in every living room in the city, who would now declare Green guilty, no matter what the facts might say. No matter that Patterson’s wife was nowhere near death and had been pissed to the gills behind the wheel of her car.

At the end of his summation, Patterson turned to leave and the reporter suddenly came to life. “Mr. Patterson, what case are you talking about?”

He shook his head and continued to walk towards the hospital entrance. The reporter scrambled after him. “Was it a criminal case?”

He ignored her, and the cameraman swung his camera off his shoulder, ready to pack it up. Sullivan hung back unobtrusively, waiting for the crowd of onlookers to disperse. Suddenly he heard footsteps and a frantic cry.

“Dad! Dad!” He turned to see a young woman about his own daughter’s age hurrying across the lawn from the street, tottering awkwardly on her platform shoes. Her dreadlocks shone green in the sunlight, and her black-rimmed eyes looked sepulchral. Sensing a story, the cameraman hoisted his camera back onto his shoulder and flipped it on. Patterson whirled on him.

“Turn that thing off!”

The cameraman pointed his camera away as if in acquiescence, but Sullivan could see it was still on. More importantly, it was now pointing towards the approaching girl. She was red-faced from the unaccustomed burst of exertion, and she panted as she lumbered up.