Stain of the Berry (34 page)

I followed. "You can call me if you want."

Yeah, sure, heard that one before. "You're number's not in the book."

He cocked an eye my way as he slid into his car then rambled off a number that I committed to memory.

"Whenever," he said as his car's engine rumbled to troubled life. "Just not now. Sorry guy," he added 142 of 163

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with a smirk. "I guess I'm whipped, eh?" And with that he backed out of his stall and sped off in a putrid puff of exhaust fumes.

I waved a jaunty so-long and headed back to my car. I was thinking about making a stop at the YW for a much-needed workout when my cellphone rang.

"Yo," I answered, trying out a new greeting.

"Russell," it was Errall. "We've been trying to find you for hours. Don't you ever check your...oh God, never mind that."

Suddenly my back went stiff and my veins filled with ice. There was something in her voice that demanded I pay close attention. Something bad had happened.

"Russell, we're at RUH..." The most heart-wrenching sound escaped her lips and I feared (wished?) she wouldn't go on. But she did. "Jared has been...oh God, Russell, Jared has been attacked...I think...he's dying."

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The seven-wing, seven-storey Royal University Hospital is located adjacent to the University of Saskatchewan campus off College Drive near the top of the University Bridge; it serves as the main trauma centre for the entire province. The interminable journey from Hagar's Heath to RUH was an exercise in sheer mental agony. I could not bear not knowing what was happening to Jared, the partner of my mentor, Anthony Gatt, and a man for whom I harboured an intense and inappropriate love, but above all, a dear, close friend.

Leaving the car in a parking lot, I sprinted to the Emergency Room entrance. I burst inside and immediately caught sight of Errall in the waiting room to the right of the doors, standing at the far end of the tiny room, on the phone, her back to me. I studied the other faces in the small area, none were familiar. I walked up to her and gently placed a hand on her left shoulder. She turned around with a jerk, as if expecting some sort of attack. When she saw it was me, she immediately hung up the phone. I'd never seen her eyes look that way before. Errall is known for the clarity and sharpness of her impossibly blue eyes, but at that moment they were dull, watery, bloodshot and unfathomably sad.

"Errall," I whispered. "Tell me."

"Let's get out of here," she hissed. "I've just gotta get out of this fucking place." A couple of the other people in the waiting room stared at her, not with distaste at her choice of words, but with empathy, for they understood only too well where she was coming from.

She led me through the ambulance bay and outside, the same way I'd come in, and immediately lit up a cigarette with unsteady hands. I wanted one too. Instead I put my hands on her shoulders, glued my eyes to hers and said, "Errall, what the hell is going on?"

"Anthony was at the store when he got a call from the hospital saying they'd found his name and number in Jared's wallet as the person to contact in case of an accident."

'He was in an accident? Is that it? What? For God's sake, Errall, what happened to Jared?" I fought a reckless temptation to throttle the information out of her.

The words came out of her mouth as if each was laden with spurs, causing her physical pain to say them. "It was no accident. Someone threw acid in Jared's face."

I was stunned. For a moment it was as if I hadn't heard her, as if the world had stopped communicating to me and I was in a bubble of oblivion, so quiet, serene, no sensory stimulation at all. But then, all too soon, reality exploded in my brain and I felt as if I might disintegrate.

"How? How, how, how?" was all I managed to get out.

Errall took two deep drags of her cigarette in quick succession. "I don't know. Anthony called me on his way here. He said he'd beer, trying to find you but couldn't. I told him to leave it to me." Her dark circled eyes grabbed on to mine as if they were drowning and looking for rescue. "It's bad, Russell. I think it's really bad."

"Where's Anthony now?"

"He and Jared's parents are with Jared, or as close as they'll let them get. They won't let anyone else in right now. I've been fucking alone with no one to talk to in that fucking stinking waiting room filled with snot-nosed kids and guys with fucking cuts oozing blood on the fucking floor..."

"Will you watch your fucking mouth!" I told her in a pressing tone. She was about to lose control-I was too-and this wasn't the time. "This isn't about you, Errall! Have you talked to Anthony at all? Do you know how this happened?"

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"Barely," she said, surprisingly not striking out with a sharp tongue or fingernail to impale me for telling her off. "All Anthony told me on the phone was that Jared was attacked in their apartment. Someone must have come to the door. Afterwards, Jared was able to get to a phone and dial 9-1-1. Whoever it was who called Anthony from the hospital said someone had thrown a substance in Jared's face and they thought it might be acid. They didn't know if...if his body could survive the trauma...Russell, oh God, Russell, why would this happen to our sweet, sweet Jared?"

I had the sinking feeling I knew the answer to that. Or at least part of the answer. "Do they have a suspect?" I questioned. "Are the police involved? Has someone been caught?"

"Why are you asking me all these questions I don't know the answer to?" she spat at me. "I hate that!"

She tossed aside her spent cigarette with great disdain and readied for another.

"Errall, you know this case I'm working on."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. Her face took on the look of someone desperate for a change of subject.

"I think Jared is involved somehow."

"What are you talking about? How? Weren't you hired to find out why that woman jumped off the Broadway Condos building?"

"Yes, that's how it began, but it's become something much different. One thing led to another and then another..."

"But how is Jared involved?"

"I think the boogeyman is after him."

When Errall could smoke no more, I led her back into the waiting room. I didn't want to be far should Anthony or a doctor come out with news of Jared. Thankfully emergencies in Saskatoon that Thursday evening hit a slow spell and we mostly had the uncomfortable seats and bad coffee to ourselves. We spent some time going over what we didn't know and eventually fell into private silences, contemplating the fate of our friend.

"Russell," came a familiar voice.

I looked up from where I'd slouched down into my seat. It was Constable Darren Kirsch. Both Errall and I jumped up and, forgoing greetings of any sort, barraged him with questions.

"I thought I'd find you here," he said in a calm, professional voice.

Two men in their forties pushing an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair entered the waiting room about then and Darren shepherded us into a corner where we sat in a tight group.

"Have you seen him? Have you heard anything?" I asked him.

"Although Jared was lucid enough following his attack to phone 9-1-1, by the time the emergency response team arrived on the scene he was unconscious. They had to break down the door to the apartment. He's been slipping in and out of consciousness ever since. We've been unable to talk to him to find out exactly what happened or if he knew his attacker or attackers."

"But you've been to the apartment, where it happened?" I said. "You have some ideas, right?"

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time. We must have passed muster, because he went on. "There was no forced entry-other than the ERT-so it would appear that Jared let his attacker in."

"It was someone he knew!" Errall exclaimed.

"Not necessarily. It just means Jared didn't suspect a threat from this person." He took a breath before continuing. "It appears that the attack took place right in the doorway. A substance was tossed into Jared's face. We're quite certain now that it was some low-grade form of acid."

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

"Is it...is it bad?" Errall croaked out.

The big cop only nodded.

All I could think of was Jared's face, a thing of such great beauty it had graced the cover of almost every major fashion and entertainment magazine in North America and Europe. People were awestruck by the curves and edges of a face put together in such perfect proportion that it defied easy description or conventional definition; the olive skin that gave him the exotic look of an untouchable stranger, the golden green eyes of a gentle lioness, the thick lips that when turned into a smile lit up a room. I did not know if
I
could live without Jared's face; how could he?

And then, one other thought. Acid was also used to desecrate Duncan Sikorsky's artwork in Vancouver.

"I spoke with Anthony," Darren told us.

"How is he?" Errall and I both asked at once.

"As you might expect. I spoke with him about whether he had any idea who might have done this. He didn't. He said everyone loves Jared." He looked at me then. "But Jared told him about your experience at The Berry Barn-I read the police report-and that you thought Jared might somehow be tied to the case you're working on. I need you to tell me what's going on, Quant." It wasn't a request.

I glanced around the room, and except for the two men and their mother /mother-in-law who were commiserating quietly amongst themselves, the place was empty. "It began with Tanya Culinare," I said in hushed tones, "the woman who jumped off the Broadway Condominiums building. That led to me to discover the death of her ex-girlfriend, Moxie Banyon."

"Another suicide?" Errall asked.

"Accident, or so it seems-to some."

"I asked the Moose Jaw cops some questions, like you asked, Quant," Darren said. "There really wasn't much of an investigation. It seemed like she drowned, no cause for suspicion."

I strongly disagreed with that assessment. "What about now?"

"We'll be looking into things a little deeper."

"I don't know how, but I think Moxie Banyon was murdered, maybe unpremeditated, but murdered nonetheless."

"Quant, what the hell...?"

"Just listen to me. As I dug into the recent past of Tanya and Moxie, I found a disturbing similarity, a pattern of extreme, unrelenting harassment, as if someone wanted to scare them to death."

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"You think Tanya Culinare and Moxie Banyon were scared to death?" He sounded incredulous and, really, I didn't blame him.

I nodded. "First off, Tanya Culinare was not the most stable person to begin with. Then all this shit begins to happen, first to Moxie, then to her. They end up breaking up, or maybe they decide to part ways for a while until things return to normal-I'm not sure which. Moxie moves to Moose Jaw, then she-not a swimmer-ends up in a pool, fully dressed and drowns. The barrage of harassment against Tanya escalates.

I'm not a therapist, and I don't know if Tanya was unstable enough to be the type of person already at risk to kill herself, but given this constant environment of fear and mental torture, I think that's exactly what happened.

"I think the night she died, she'd been driven to the limit and finally cracked. For months she'd suffered almost daily doses of harassment: threatening phone calls, things that go bump in the night, mysterious packages showing up on her doorstep, constantly being watched or followed, all petty irritations that when added together were driving her around the bend. She had no family here, no friends to speak of, her lover had left town...and then died...she'd been to see a therapist but it wasn't helping; he may not have even believed that what she said she was experiencing was real. Her only real friend, her boss Victoria Madison, didn't believe her.

"Then that last night, she was hiding out in her apartment as she often did, alone, scared, as she often was, and then once more she heard noises, as if someone was trying to get into her apartment. Maybe the phone was ringing too. Desperate and frightened, she tried to reach out for help. She knew that if she couldn't put an end to this, she'd go insane. She'd already tried the police. Her boss had given her the number of a private detective: me.

"So, she calls me. It's two-thirty in the morning. She tells me that someone is coming to get her, that he wants to hurt her. She sounds like someone who is frightened to death. It's too much for her. She hangs up.

She's all alone, no one to turn to. Someone is there, wanting to hurt her, perhaps kill her like they killed her girlfriend. She can't leave the apartment because she believes this boogeyman is behind the door, so she escapes to the balcony. Someone is still trying to get in, scratching at the door, phone still ringing, she feels all alone, helpless, terrified, desperate. She jumps."

For a moment the three of us sat there in silence, somehow sensing that my scenario was not far off from what really happened to Tanya Culinare that sad night.

I added an extraneous thought, "It could be that whoever was carrying out this systematic harassment didn't necessarily expect Tanya to kill herself."

Errall completed my gruesome hypothesis. "But it was a welcome result?"

I nodded and continued to unfold the steps of my case. "Then I met Moxie's best friend, Duncan-a man terrified of his own shadow. I found out he's been suffering the same kind of harassment from the elusive boogeyman character."

"Boogeyman," Kirsch stated flatly. "How can you be certain it's the same guy doing all of this? And why 'boogeyman'?"