The Taken (13 page)

“Ask him if Pat Barlow is there.”

Wingate did, and then passed Hazel the phone when she gestured for it. “Ms. Barlow?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know where that mannequin was?”

Wingate creased his eyes at her. “What?” said Barlow.

“You must have known exactly where it was if you drove your customers right to it.”

“Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?”

“Well?”

“It’s bad enough the lake is full of fry this year, Detective Inspector. You really think I make up for bad fishing with jokes?”

“So you just happened upon that thing.”

There was a pause. “I had
no
idea what was down there,” Barlow said slowly. “I’m not lying.”

“If you were, that’s what you’d say anyway.”

“If you want to arrest me for something, do it,” said Barlow angrily. “But if you just want to blow smoke up my ass, leave a message next time.” She slammed the phone down and Hazel pulled her head back smartly. Wingate was looking at her with an unimpressed look on his face.

“It was worth a try,” she said.

“Was it?”

“Look,
something
has to give here!
Someone
is waving their hand in front of our face:
hey! look here, look here!
But what are we supposed to be doing?”

“What can we do?” he asked. “We can’t inspect every basement in the county.”

“It would be better than sitting on our rear ends.”

“I’m frustrated too,” he said.

She held up the last folder she’d been reading. “I’m starting to think I’ve got a better chance of clearing the Darjeeling Caper than making heads or tails of what turned up in Gannon Lake. Maybe there’s a next move, but I don’t know what it is. All I can think of is Eldwin now. You keep on his wife and try to nail down where her husband is.”

“Will do,” said Wingate.

She closed the files that were in front of her and pushed them to him across the desk. “I’m done with these.”

Wingate was about to leave the paperwork when there was a knock at the door, and Cartwright pushed it open partway. “Busy?”

“I was just leaving,” said Wingate, and he slipped past her in the doorway. Cartwright came in with a coffee and a giant chocolate muffin, both of which she put down on Hazel’s desk.

“Early birthday present,” she said.

Wingate bent back into the doorway. “Your birthday?”

“Thursday,” said Hazel. “I’m going to be thirty-nine again.” He looked blankly at her. No one had got her Jack Benny joke in ten years. It was sad how things kept changing.

She was aware of the shadows of her personnel sliding by in the frosted window in the door, but for almost an hour, no one had disturbed her. She watched numbly the endless attack on the unknown victim unspooling on her laptop. It was like a song she couldn’t get out of her head, a song without lyrics, although the more she watched the sequence, the more she became aware of the dreadful music in it. The Percocet she’d taken before leaving the house had peaked and was wearing off: it made the
footage seem more raw to her, it hurt more to watch it, and she thought of the other pill, the one wrapped in tinfoil, in her pants pocket, which she wasn’t going to touch unless she really needed it. She’d taken the morning pill as a precaution, although if she were being entirely honest with herself she’d admit she’d taken it because she wanted to. In general, she could feel various aches reasserting themselves at various times, but the truth was she was beginning to feel certain that she could get through the day on her own. She could keep the bottle of pills – and the one in her pocket – as a promise of comfort if she needed it.
Needed
it, she told herself.

She got out a scrap of paper from a drawer and wrote down in point form some of the things she thought she should bring up with Willan tomorrow morning. She’d try at first to focus on what they were actually
doing
in Port Dundas before he trotted out his ratios and his per-capitas. She wanted him to hear what they were dealing with, especially now, and how important the police department was in the community. Willan was going to use the word
catchment
and talk about efficiencies. He was going to tell her Port Dundas would take on the mantle of county HQ, and she’d be in charge of
more
people than she was now: it was going to be a
challenge
and he knew she could
rise
to it. And when she told him it would mean lost jobs and fewer services and maybe not being able to solve crimes like the one they were working on
right now
, he was going to shrug and tell her redistribution of employees would amount to a couple of lucrative early retirements, a couple of redeployments, no one was getting fired, and all they’d have to do after the rearranging would be to stay on top of their game …
just like they are now!
She’d never met this man – apart from the letter that
had been sent around to her beat cops, she didn’t know a thing about him – and already she didn’t like him.

She let Melanie bring her a late lunch of a club sandwich and a Diet Coke, and stayed at her desk writing out facts and figures as they pertained to Port Dundas. While she wrote, she kept the laptop screen tilted discreetly away so as not to be distracted by it. But she saw the loop repeat and repeat in the corner of her eye.

She saw their detachment’s case clearly, but she knew he’d only hear her trying to save their own bacon. What did OPSC know about Westmuir? When did those clowns ever leave their desks and come and see the policing realities up here? Anything north of Central was a pin on one of their maps, a line on a graph. She hoped she wouldn’t be reduced to shouting.

Melanie knocked again about half an hour later, and Hazel didn’t look up from her notes, just told her she was done lunch and thanks, but Melanie was standing in the doorway. “What is it?”

“Surprise!” she said.

Hazel put down her pen. Cartwright was holding up a large box wrapped in bright paper. It seemed half the detachment was standing in the hallway behind her. “Come on, now,” said Hazel. “You guys are too much.”

Cartwright pushed the door fully open and came in to put the box down on her desk. Windemere, Bail, Wilton, Wingate, and Forbes followed her in with big grins on their faces. It was one of those department-store wrapping jobs: hospital corners, ribbon, and a rosette. “This better not be another cellphone,” she said, and they all laughed. She turned it around. “You all tossed five bucks into a hat, but you couldn’t manage a card?”

Cartwright turned on the officers and gave them an exasperated look. “You guys raised by wolves, or what?” “Hey, don’t look at me,” said Forbes.

“Never mind,” said Hazel, and she began to tear at the paper. Within was a child’s toy, a game called Mouse Trap. Everyone laughed and clapped, and someone said it was a very clever gift. Hazel remembered the game from Martha’s childhood: you won by building a Rube Goldberg machine that dropped a plastic net on top of a mouse. She looked up grinning at the officers. “Absolutely fitting,” she said. “Whose idea was this?”

They looked back and forth between them, but no one was taking credit.

“What? I have a secret admirer?”

“Well, I just followed the bright paper,” admitted Windemere. “I actually, uh, didn’t contribute.” She turned to her colleagues. “Yet!”

Hazel put her hands on top of the box. “So … this is from all of you?” No one said anything. She picked up the gift. “What’s going on?” she said, but then all at once she dropped the box on the table and stood, alarmed.

“What?” said Wingate, stepping forward into the room.

“That doesn’t smell right,” she said. “There’s something in there, that isn’t a … isn’t a –”

“Okay,” he said, “let’s everyone get out of this room –” but he didn’t finish what he was saying, because the box was moving. There was a sound from within it, like a mechanical whine, and then something was tearing frantically at the end of the box, moving it in short jabs toward the end of the table until it upended and went crashing to the floor.

“Jesus,” said Hazel, instinctively stepping away, but as she did something blew out of the top of the half-opened box, a red, screeching blur like a child’s firecracker, and she dove for the ground, batting at the air over her head. There was general disorder in the room, strange half-uttered cries, and a crush for the door, but then Forbes called out, “Hold on! Hold on –”

“Fuck!” yelled Hazel, now standing again. She stared at what Forbes was staring at. “What the fuck?”

It was a mouse. It was standing in the corner, its eyes shuttling back and forth between the two sides of the room. She supposed it was a regular white mouse, but this one was red, or at least it had been painted red, although she could see a darker line of what had to be blood dripping from its mouth.

“Why is that thing red?” said Hazel. “What the hell is going on here?” Forbes and Wingate stepped deeper into the room, walking carefully to the side of her desk where the game had fallen. Wingate toed the lids apart and then recoiled.

“Good god,” he said.

Down in Mayfair, on Jack Deacon’s mortuary table, it looked unreal, a movie prop. But it
was
real, and as Deacon turned it over with his living hand and Howard Spere took notes with a pen held in his gloved hands, the whole scene took on an even more surreal aspect.

Deacon was talking into a tape recorder as Spere wrote. “Left hand of a caucasian male, age between forty and fifty, no distinguishing characteristics –”

“Apart from its being separated from its owner,” said Spere.

“Apart from that. The cut has been made under the carpals, a rough cut to judge by its raggedness and the bits of shattered bone we find here. I can only hope the victim was knocked out or dead when it was done.”

“I don’t think he was,” said Hazel quietly. She was standing away from the brightly lit table, not wanting to look too closely on the thing that had been sent to her wrapped in colourful paper. She was sweating in the cold room. Wingate stood beside
her, leaning forward to get a better look. “We have the attack on film.”

“We don’t actually have the attack,” said Wingate. “Just the moments leading up to it. There’s no proof that this hand and that … that person in the chair …”

“Is there a way to tell if the victim was alive when his hand was … removed?” asked Hazel.

“It’s not really possible to say with any certainty,” said Deacon. “Not with this body part, at least. I’d want to see more necrotized blood to be certain it was a post-mortem amputation. This thing is very pale indeed, so there’s been blood loss, and that’s consistent with an extremity disambiguated while blood was still circulating.” He held the hand palm up and studied it for a moment. “The wrist tendons have retreated into the cut a little – that windowshade effect you see when living tendon has been cut … and I guess that tends to argue for the hand being cut from a living body. But you’d
still
see some of this pre-rigor spring-back immediately post-mortem. So what we have in front of us doesn’t
rule out
that the victim was alive at the moment of amputation. Or that he was dead, mind you.”

“Jesus,” said Hazel. “Do you
want
us to throw up?”

“Look,” said Spere, “what about the puncture wounds, where the note was pinned? Is there any bruising?”

Deacon looked again at the top of the hand. A note written on a square white piece of paper had been attached there with a fishhook. A “nice touch” was how Spere had put it when he saw it. Deacon pulled the skin tight with latex-gloved thumb and forefinger and shone a pinlight onto it. “Good instinct, Howard. Hazel?”

She stepped forward reluctantly. “Do I really need to see this?”

“Slight purpling at the wound sites,” he said. “Dead bodies don’t bruise.”

Spere held his palms up to the heavens. “Ah, an
answer.”

“That only means he was alive when the note was pinned to him,” said Wingate.

“That’s correct.”

“So this fuck pinned the note to the victim’s hand and
then
sawed it off?” said Hazel.

“That
strikes you as particularly barbaric?” said Spere, wiggling a finger around in his auditory canal.

Wingate was holding the note, in its zip-lock bag, up to the light. “‘Just wanted to give you a hand with your investigation,’” he read.

Spere shook his head.
“And
he’s funny.”

Hazel had retreated again and was leaning against one of the autopsy tables on the other side of the room. If she had to look at that severed hand again, she really was going to be sick. “This brings things to another level,” she said. “We have to think through our options.”

“What if this person just wants us to watch?” said Wingate. “What if this is a demonstration of some kind?”

“Of what kind?”

“Of power.”

“And for what purpose?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She pushed off the table. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to visit the
Record
and see what they can tell us about Eldwin. Why is he writing about this stuff? The body in
the lake, the fishhook, the note …” She fell silent a moment. “I’ll tell you one thing: he’s not getting any more ink, not until we understand what this is all about. We’ll flush him out: if he wants to keep telling this macabre story, he’s going to have to show his face.”

Wingate was looking right through her. He was lost in his thoughts. After a moment, he approached her and spoke quietly. “What if he
can’t?”

“Will we know the difference between
can’t
and
won’t?”
Wingate didn’t have a response. “Fingerprint that thing and put it on ice,” Hazel said to Spere. He nodded to her, holding a finger up. His cell had buzzed.

“Just a second.” He held the phone to his chest. “I’ve got Allen Barry on the phone. He’s my imaging guy in Toronto. He wants to know if we can receive a file down here.”

“You mean couriered?” said Deacon.

“No, a singing telegram, Jack. He means over the net.”

“We can go up to my office.”