Old City Hall (11 page)

This was the last thing Bering would do on the case. She had a six-month leave coming, and she was going back home to the Yukon to visit her dad. “Only me,” she’d joke with him, “taking my holidays in the Arctic in the winter.”

The only exception to this pattern Kennicott could find for the whole month was the Wednesday before, December 12. Torn appeared on the video that day at 1:15, in the lobby, not the parking garage. She was dressed in a business suit and high heels, and she carried a long envelope in her hand. She spoke briefly to Rasheed and then waited for about five minutes in one of the overstuffed lobby chairs, looking out the front window. When something caught her eye, she jumped up and rushed outside. Rasheed went out with her, as if, Kennicott thought, he was putting her in a taxi. Kennicott checked the logbook and read the entry: “Taxi for Mrs. Brace, 1:20, Rasheed.”

Earlier that morning, Brace had left the condominium at the regular time. The people at the radio station said he followed his usual routine. But that afternoon he didn’t come back home.

Just before five o’clock Brace and Torn walked back into the lobby. Clearly they’d met up somewhere. Kennicott ran the tape back and confirmed that Brace was wearing the same clothes he had on earlier, when he’d left for work. Neither Torn’s diary nor her Palm Pilot had anything listed for that afternoon. That night the couple didn’t go out. Where, Kennicott wondered, had they gone?

It was about four in the morning when Kennicott got to Katherine Torn’s wallet. He’d intentionally left it to the end. The wallet would be more meaningful if he knew as much as possible about her life before he looked at it.

This wasn’t the first time he had examined the wallet of a dead person. Four and a half years ago he’d pulled apart his brother Michael’s wallet and every other possession he could find. Credit card receipts, phone bills, bank records, electronic calendar, computer hard drive, desk drawers, and even Mike’s garbage. It was amazing how much you
could learn about a dead person—and disturbingly intrusive. He’d found a plane ticket to Florence, a car-rental receipt, hotel reservations, and a raft of brochures about an Italian hill town named Gubbio. There was an annual summer crossbow contest scheduled for the following week. He still hadn’t figured out why his brother was going there.

Poor Katherine Torn. Clearly she was a very private person. Now she lay dead on a slab in the morgue, a complete stranger wearing surgical gloves combing through her life. Kennicott had asked forensics to copy all of the wallet’s contents and to put each item back exactly as they’d found them. It wasn’t just what was in a wallet that was important, but how the things were arranged. The location, the order, the feel.

He began at the change purse. He counted out $2.23 in change, three subway tokens, and a laundry pickup slip for three men’s shirts. The first compartment held forty-five dollars in bills and six different coupons for things like breakfast cereal, laundry soap, and kitchen cleaner. There was a dog-eared frequent-user’s card from the Lettieri Espresso Bar and Café on Front Street. Three of the ten squares were stamped.

Looks like she was a penny-pincher, Kennicott thought as he opened the next compartment. It was filled with plastic cards. She had a Visa and a MasterCard, a library card, a Royal Ontario Museum card, and cards from five different department stores. The store cards struck him right away. Department stores were notorious for charging outrageously high interest rates, usually preying upon the poor and, in Toronto, the teeming immigrant population. Kennicott had seen this when he was a lawyer. Clients who appeared to be wealthy, but in fact were desperately trying to keep up with their monthly payments. They’d spread their debt around like this, digging deeper and deeper holes for themselves.

The third compartment held a fistful of receipts and Torn’s checkbook. Kennicott worked his way through each item. She had carefully recorded the date and spending category on each slip of paper: household, entertainment, personal. Her handwriting was jagged, forced. He looked through her check stubs. Mostly small purchases. Her only
extravagance seemed to be personal-care items from a very chic store in Yorkville, the city’s upscale boutique area. Kennicott had been there too many times. When his ex-girlfriend Andrea got into modeling, she had become a regular customer, and like Torn, she’d bought a seemingly endless supply of products: sponges, herbal shampoos, organic soaps, body lotions, hand-ground makeup, imported facial masks, specialty eye creams, and moisturizers.

Andrea liked to drag Kennicott to the shop. He found the place overwhelmingly boring. “Oh, stop complaining, Daniel,” she’d say. “You like beautiful women, and it’s a lot of work staying gorgeous.”

There was only one item in the last compartment—a finely printed and embossed business card. Kennicott examined it carefully:
HOWARD PEEL, PRESIDENT, PARALLEL BROADCASTING
.

Kennicott paused. He went back to his long list of all the items they’d found in the apartment. The connection was easy to make. In the top drawer of Kevin Brace’s desk they’d found an unsigned contract between Brace and Parallel Broadcasting. Kennicott fished out the contract and read through it.

When he finished, he looked at Peel’s card again. In contrast to everything else in Torn’s well-ordered wallet, and every other scrap of paper that was carefully folded and neatly stored, all four corners of Peel’s card were cracked and bent over. It was as if Torn had worried the edges of the fine paper, the way a nervous suitor pulls the label off a wine bottle at a good restaurant.

He looked back at the contract. It was dated December 12. Kennicott riffled through the videos from the lobby and played the tape from that day. It was the day Torn had skipped her riding lesson. He fast-forwarded to the part where she and Brace came back into the lobby late in the afternoon. Something about it had seemed off the first time he’d watched it. What was it?

He had to play it three times before it struck him. This was the only tape in which Brace and Torn walked into the lobby together and they were not holding hands.

J
ust to the west of the Market Place Tower, Ari Greene watched a group of mothers pushing strollers and sipping their midmorning lattes. Maybe I should start drinking coffee, he thought, yawning, as he fell into line behind them. It was his third covert pass by the condominium in the last half hour. This time the lobby was empty.

The concierge, Rasheed, was alone. He was reading the front page of the
Toronto Star
, which featured a big picture of Kevin Brace being led out of the condo in handcuffs by two young police officers, Mr. Singh in the background. A banner headline read
CAPTAIN CANADA CHARGED WITH MURDER
, and the subtitle said
STAR REPORTER’S EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF ARREST
.

“Good morning, Detective,” Rasheed said. He had a ballpoint pen in his hand, which he clicked a few times. “Going up?”

Greene stopped and lifted a thin leather briefcase onto the reception desk. “Not yet,” he said. “First I want to ask you a few questions. Routine stuff.” Greene unzipped the case. The cool metallic sound of the zipper crackled in the marble foyer.

Rasheed clicked the pen in his hand and ticked off something in his logbook. “I made a statement and gave all the videos and the logbook to Officer Kennicott.”

Greene nodded. He opened the notebook he’d pulled from his case. He wanted to take this slowly. “You know how we police are, always asking more questions.”

Greene had been up all night, overseeing the investigation. Reading the various witness statements and police reports as they came in. At eight in the morning he’d gone and had tea with Edna Wingate, the neighbor in suite 12B. Her apartment was a mirror image of Brace’s suite, but unlike his place, it was filled with plants and was extremely neat. Everything seemed to have little labels, right down to the place for her winter gloves. She’d reminded him again that her yoga instructor said she had the best quads he’d ever seen in an eighty-three-year-old.

Rasheed stopped clicking the pen and met Greene’s eyes. For a moment his eyes flickered toward Greene’s briefcase. Good, Greene thought.

Greene opened his notebook. “What’s your full legal name, sir?”

“Rasheed, Mubarak, Rasman, Sarry.”

Greene began to write. “Date of birth?”

“The fifth of the second, nineteen hundred and forty-nine.”

“Place of birth?”

“Iran.”

“Education?”

“I’m a civil engineer, graduate from the University of Tehran.”

“You came to Canada when?”

“September 24, 1982, as a refugee claimant. I became a Canadian citizen the first day I was eligible to do so.”

“At a ceremony in the Etobicoke Civic Centre,” Greene said, raising his voice a notch and closing his book with a hard snap. “Correct?”

Rasheed looked taken aback by Greene’s sudden change in tone. “That is correct,” he said. The man seemed a bit shaken. Exactly what Greene wanted.

“After the fall of the shah, you were captured and held in captivity for nine and a half months. Your wife’s family bribed an official, and you walked to freedom. It took you twenty-five days. In March of 1980 you ended up in Italy, went to Switzerland, then France, and from there came to Canada.”

Greene spoke quickly, never taking his eyes off Rasheed.

Rasheed held Greene’s gaze. He looked trapped. Finally he glanced down at Greene’s briefcase. “I see, Detective, that you have read my refugee claim file.”

“It’s right here.” Greene pulled out a white file. There were five fresh yellow tabs marking off various points.

Rasheed’s pen started to click again.

“You come from a prominent family,” Greene said as he zipped his bag closed. “At your hearing, you told the Refugee Board that in the early days of the revolution your younger brother and your father were killed.”

Rasheed looked back at Greene. “The murder of one’s family is a terrible thing.”

Greene thought of the numbers on his father’s arm, but he resisted the urge to nod his head. Instead he told a story. “Sir, in the late 1970s I spent a month in Paris.”

“A most beautiful city.”

“But for a foreigner, in January, cold. One day I stumbled into a tea shop on the rue de Malte. There were warm pillows on the floor, lovely tea brewing, soft incense burning. The owners were Iranians. Recent refugees from the ayatollah. We became close friends.”

Rasheed smiled, a plastic, pasted-on smile. He’s been wearing that facade for years, Greene thought, and it’s not going to crack easily. “Many of my new friends had walked through the mountains to Turkey,” Greene said softly.

The concierge’s smile seemed to slip.

“I must have heard twenty such stories,” Greene said. “And it never took anyone more than four days to get across the mountains.”

Rasheed’s nostrils flared, and he gave a hearty laugh. “There were many mountain passes, Detective.”

Let him get a bit cocky, Greene thought. He opened the file at the first yellow tab. He wanted Rasheed to see that he was reading a section with the heading
CLAIMANT’S HISTORY IN HOME COUNTRY
.

“Detective,” Rasheed said, staring at the file, “I had a full refugee hearing—”

“At which you denied ever having been a member of the shah’s notorious SAVAK guard. Denied working for Nemotallah Nassiri, the head of the agency.”

“Of course—”

“Of course,” Greene said, his head down, still reading the file. “Nassiri was flown to Paris by some sympathetic members of the Iranian Air Force. Wasn’t he?”

“I believe I heard about that, yes,” Rasheed said.

Greene flipped through some more pages. “You’re a trained civil engineer.”

Rasheed looked at him without saying a word.

Greene’s eyes drifted back down at the file. “Came to Canada from France.”

“As you said yourself, Detective, many of us ended up in Paris.”

Greene stopped flipping the pages and let the file fall open at a page titled
EVIDENCE OF TORTURE
. “Mr. Rasheed,” he said, “many of my friends in Paris were tortured. I saw horrible scars.”

“It happened to all of us.”

Greene looked back up at Rasheed and leaned over the desk. “But you never had any scars. Did you?”

“Detective, please.” Rasheed didn’t know where to look. Greene could smell him sweating. “I have never taken a penny of welfare from this country. Never been arrested or gotten a parking ticket. My wife works full-time at the bakery. My children, both in university. Two girls—”

“At the University of Toronto,” Greene said, leaning in even farther. “The oldest is in dentistry, the youngest in pharmacy.”

“Detective, please. I gave Officer Kennicott all the tapes, the log-book, made a statement . . .”

Greene slowly unzipped his briefcase. He slid his hand back in and pulled out a color-coded piece of paper. “Officer Kennicott went through every tape, cross-referenced them with the logbook, and cross-referenced both with the different doormen who were on duty for the last week. Here, look, your shifts are highlighted in blue.”

Greene held out the paper. Rasheed looked at it reluctantly, like a man peering over the edge of a railing as he walks across a high bridge.

“It didn’t take long to realize that the story you told us when we first interviewed you about Mr. Brace was not the whole truth,” Greene said. “Just like it wasn’t hard for me to conclude that the story you told the Refugee Board was full of lies.”

Rasheed stared at Greene. The light had gone out of his eyes.

Greene leaned in closer. “Rasheed, I don’t want to do this. My own father was a refugee. Had to do things to get into this country that I still don’t understand.” He touched the file in front of the concierge. “I’d like to put this away and forget about it.”

“Detective, please,” Rasheed said. “If they send me back, that would be the end—”

“This is a murder investigation. Katherine Torn is dead. Mr. Brace is looking at twenty-five years in jail. I need to know what happened.” Greene put his hand on the zipper.