Stranglehold (13 page)

The autopsy had been performed after midnight. The only evidence they’d got from it was some fragments of black leather from under her fingernails. The leather most likely came from a pair of gloves. She’d probably tried to scratch her attacker, but he hadn’t left any skin exposed. And under her right forefinger, a bit of paper and glue.

Then he and Alpine had meticulously combed through the records of every person Raglan had prosecuted for murder in the last five years. Three were gangbangers, still in jail. One was an alcoholic who’d killed another alcoholic in a bar fight. He’d been deported back to Barbados. Another was a mother who had severe postpartum depression and killed her twin babies. She was still institutionalized. A man who’d murdered his wife after she found him sleeping with George, her personal trainer, had pled to manslaughter and was out on parole. He’d returned home to Niagara Falls, where he worked as a boat hand on
The Maid of the Mist.
When Raglan was killed, he’d been passing out rain slicks to tourists before they came on board.

It turned out that Seaton Wainwright, the film producer charged with fraud who’d threatened Jennifer Raglan in the courthouse last week, secretly had a Lithuanian passport. He used it to fly to Paris on the Sunday night, hours before the murder. Apparently he had a new Brazilian girlfriend there and no plans of coming back to Canada.

Finally there was a woman named Samantha Wyler, convicted two years earlier of stabbing her ex-husband to death in the kitchen of his suburban Toronto home the night before their divorce trial was set to begin. Raglan had won the trial, but a few weeks later Greene and Kennicott, who were both on the
case, discovered that the husband’s disabled brother was the killer just before he jumped off a bridge to his death. Wyler was released from jail.

Kennicott, determined to leave no stone unturned, wondered if it was possible the brother, who was in love with Wyler, had literally taken the fall for her. Perhaps she was an enraged, pathological killer, bent on revenge?

This morning he’d walked out of the building and used his cell to call Greene. He caught him on his car phone and told him about his idea.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything of it,” Greene had replied, “until you find out if she has an alibi.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Why don’t you find out, before you start worrying about the ifs,” Greene said.

It had taken two phone calls to establish that yesterday Wyler had been up north in Cobalt, a small town six hours from Toronto where she was born and had gone back to live. She’d been teaching an adult reading class in the local library.

Some killer, Kennicott thought. He felt like an idiot and promised himself not to ask Greene any more stupid questions until he checked things out himself.

Right now all they had for suspects were Raglan’s unknown lover and her husband, Howard Darnell, the man with the perfect alibi. Kennicott had put him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Yesterday evening, on the live feed from their mikes inside the house, they’d heard one of the kids crying, all of them talking with their dad, phone conversations with friends offering condolences, a pizza being delivered. The oldest son, Aaron, even got in an argument with Howard because he wanted to go out. Classic family dynamics of shock and stress.

Kennicott felt horrible listening to it.

In the early hours of the morning, after he woke from his short nap, he collected the statements that the police officers on the scene had taken and put each one in a file, which he labelled by hand. It was the way he used to organize papers when he was a lawyer preparing for a big trial. He placed the files in a banker’s box in the homicide-bureau boardroom and wrote RAGLAN HOMICIDE, ACCUSED UNKNOWN on the side with a thick black marker.

Alpine, who’d been tracking down all the officers’ notes and compiling Zeilinski’s identification photos, walked in.

“There’s a new café north of Grenville,” he said, carrying a coffee tray in one hand and a bag of goodies in the other. “Guy’s Italian. Wouldn’t sell me a latte. Said real Italians drink cappuccinos before noon, lattes in the afternoon, and espresso at night, to help them sleep. Go figure.”

Kennicott eyed the cappuccino.

“I told him we had a long day ahead of us, so to expect me back a few times.” Alpine put the tray down and opened the brown bag. A yeasty smell filled the room. “His mother bakes these every morning. They’re still warm.”

Kennicott reached for the coffee, trying not to grab it.

“An older lawyer named Lloyd Gramwell recruited me to the law firm where I used to work,” he said, after his second long sip. “He hates technology. Says it makes us stop thinking. When I had an important case, he’d make me bring the file into his office and read every witness statement out loud. At first I thought it was a waste of time, but then I found it made me hear the story, which helped me to see it.”

“Never done that before.” Alpine tipped his paper cup at Kennicott. “Good coffee, eh?”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Try a pastry,” Alpine said.

Kennicott picked out a tiny, crusty croissant. It was delicious. “There are twenty-two witness statements,” he said, reaching into the box nearest to him. “We’ll take turns. I’ll read one out loud, then you do the next.”

“Okay.” Alpine pulled out a pen and pad of paper. “You start. I’ll take notes.”

“No notes,” Kennicott said. “That’s another one of Gramwell’s rules. No notes. Too distracting. Learn to listen.”

They started with the statements from the people at the motel: the owner’s, the translated versions of the Taiwanese girls’, and the schoolteacher-turned drunk. Alpine picked up the transcript of the interview of the prostitute who worked in the room above the passageway.

“Question: Did you see anyone come in or out of the courtyard this morning?”

“Answer: What time?”

“Question: Between ten and eleven?”

“Answer: One. A new client.”

“Question: What did he look like?”

“Answer: The john? He looked like a john.”

“Question: Come on, you can do better than that. Was he white, Asian, black? Tall or short, skinny or fat? You know the drill.”

“Answer: White guy. Big belly. Probably couldn’t see his own cock.”

“Question: Facial hair?”

“Answer: Most of the time, I was on my knees. I wasn’t exactly looking at his face.”

“Question: Age?”

“Answer: Old enough that it took him a while to get hard.”

“Question: Thanks for that. How long did this take?”

“Answer: Like I said, he wasn’t exactly a smoking gun.”

“Question: Where did he go after?”

“Answer: Out my door.”

“Question: What kind of car?”

“Answer: No idea.”

“Question: What time did he leave?”

“Answer: Like you said, between ten and eleven. Then I heard the sirens. Then you knocked on my door.”

“Question: You see anyone else walk under the passageway into the courtyard?”

“Answer: The ambulance and the cruiser.”

“Question: What else can you tell me?”

“Answer: That I’ve got nothing else to say to the cops.”

“Askari, the cop who interviewed her, says she slammed the door in his face.” Alpine tossed the file on the table. “Lovely. Well, she’s one witness we want to keep off the stand.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Kennicott said.

“So much for the Maple Leaf Motel,” Alpine said.

By the time they were on their afternoon lattes, they’d read through all the statements of the employees at the Coffee Time doughnut shop, the people in the mall across the road – all of whom saw nothing – and the other motel owners on Kingston Road.

Kennicott intentionally left the interviews with the people in the strip mall next to the motel until the end. He thought they were his best hope. They were having their shots of espresso when they read through the statements. Seven store owners claimed they had seen nothing. Of the nine shoppers they found, four said they hadn’t seen anything unusual and three refused to even give their names. Only one woman would talk to them at all.

“Your turn,” Kennicott said, taking out the second-last file and handing it over. “Here’s the woman who was in the Money Mart that morning. Cop found her shopping with her daughter at Kaks Hair Emporium.”

“Annabel Sawney, DOB, May fifteenth, 1958,” Alpine read.

“Question: Ms. Sawney. Where were you earlier this morning?”

“Answer: When we first got to the plaza I went to the Money Mart with Sadura, my daughter. She had a sore throat, so I kept her home from school so she wouldn’t infect the other kids. I needed some cash for the week because one of my customers was late in paying me. I had my welfare stub, so I got a three-hundred-dollar advance. You promised that this wouldn’t be reported. I didn’t see a thing.”

Alpine shrugged. “Hear no evil, see no evil,” he said. “I told you what it’s like in Scarborough.”

“I’ll read the last one.” Kennicott opened the file. “I appreciate your patience. It was worth a try at least.”

“It’s the job,” Alpine said. He didn’t look happy.

“Sadura Sawney, ten years old,” Kennicott said. “It’s one page.”

“Question: Sadura, were you with your mom earlier this morning at the Money Mart?”

“Answer: Yeah. Mommy took me to the bank. I wanted to get some red licorice and she said we could after she got her money out.”

“Question: What did you do at the bank?”

“Answer. Nothing. Just looked out the window.”

Beside him, Kennicott felt Alpine edge forward on his seat.

“Question: Did you see anyone in the parking lot?”

“Answer: I don’t know. Just cars.”

“Question: Anything else. Anyone walking fast or running?”

“Answer: No. Just a man on a funny motorcycle. A little one, like a scooter or something. And he was tall. Wearing black boots.”

“Question: Did you see what the man looked like?”

“Answer: No. He had on a helmet and gloves and everything.”

Kennicott looked at Alpine. They were both thinking the same thing. The killer had covered up his skin. The bits of leather under Raglan’s fingernails.

“Question: Did you see where he went?”

“Answer: He drove off.”

“Question: Which direction, did you see?”

“Answer: Yeah. Like up into the alley beside the Pizza Nova.”

Kennicott looked at Alpine. They knew where that alley led and were both thinking the same thing. Why wouldn’t the killer escape by driving onto Kingston Road, the big, anonymous street right in front of him, instead of risking being seen on a side street?

He closed the file folder. “That’s where the interview ends.”

“Sounds like our man was driving a scooter,” Alpine said. “There are thousands of them in the city.”

“It’s not much,” Kennicott said. He put the file back in the banker’s box and stacked their paper cups in a tower. “But at least it’s more than we had when we started with those cappuccinos.”

SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, FIFTY-TWO WEEKS A YEAR, IN THE HALF HOUR BEFORE 6
P.M.,
A GROUP OF
homeless men gathered on the north side of Queen Street, east of Sherbourne, in front of the Moss Park Discount Store. Huddled together, they sipped sugary cups of coffee from the Popeye’s fast-food restaurant across the road while waiting for the three nearby men’s shelters to open for dinner.

Many of the names and faces change daily, Ari Greene thought as he parked his Oldsmobile on the south side of Queen, between Rady Hair & Barber Salon and the Schnitzel Queen restaurant, but one man was usually there. Fraser Dent. He looked like a circus clown: bald on top, stringy hair down the sides, always wore a long jacket made of bits of cloth he’d sewn together. He never told anyone that the cloth came from his former life – each one lovingly cut from the expensive cotton shirts he used to wear to work when he was one of the city’s top foreign-currency traders.

Dent was in his usual spot, two doors down from the corner, in front of Artatorture Tattoo Parlour, a few steps away from the crowd on the corner in front of the discount store.

This was prime real estate, where he could best catch the late-afternoon sun. But not quite as prime as the penthouse condo where he’d once lived. It overlooked the harbour and was a ten-minute walk to the bond-trading floor, where for fifteen years he logged ninety-hour weeks. That was before he started living inside a bottle. Then needles.

“Monsieur Detective,” Dent said, his eyes coming to life when he spotted Greene. He was holding an extra-large cup of coffee and he raised it in a mock toast. “
Bonsoir
. Nice to see you, sir.”

“It’s been a while,” Greene said. Dent’s handshake was weak. He was thinner than usual. “How you doing?”

“Such a busy summer,” Dent said. “I didn’t get in even one round of golf and I never made it up to the cottage. Not even for a night.”

Greene chuckled. “That sounds like your old life.”

Dent smiled his remarkably childlike grin. “Funny thing is, that part of my life hasn’t changed. I used to spend my whole summer working over there while my wife was up north with the kids,” he said, pointing downtown to the high-rise towers in the distance. “Now I spend my summers on the street. Both ways, I never get to sit on a dock by the lake and listen to the loons. I thought I’d see you today.”

“Why’s that?” Greene asked.

Dent shook his head, sending his long hair flapping across his face. “Come on, Detective, I read the papers. Former head Crown strangled to death on a Monday morning out on the motel strip. Hubby’s a meek and mild accountant type. If he did it, you’d expect him to jump off a bridge or walk into 55 Division in a bloodstained shirt.”

“So?”

“So. You did a lot of trials with Raglan. She was tough. Put a lot of bad guys away. All sorts of people could have a grudge. I knew you’d be looking for me to see if I’d heard anything on the street. I’m a good researcher and I’ve done my homework.” He looked over his shoulder. “I’ll tell you about it when we’re away from this crowd.”

A few of the other men from the corner shuffled over. Greene recognized a number of them.