The Taken (19 page)
Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
The final gift was from Robert and Gail Chandler, a long, purple silk scarf. It was gorgeous. She wrapped it around her neck and then pulled Greene’s bottle toward herself and stared at it a long time.
It had been more than thirty-six hours since her last Percocet and her nerves had been crying out for solace ever since. But the adrenaline that had been roaring through her since the visit to Willan had done some of the work she’d counted on the pill to do. To painkill, yes, but also to numb, to reduce the noise in her head. After her birthday evening, though, she could feel the noise returning. The burn in her guts, the dizziness, the shakes. She recalled the small object wrapped in tinfoil that she’d had in her pants pocket yesterday. She went to the closet and found it still in the pocket of the black slacks she’d worn yesterday. She unwrapped the pill and held it in her fingers. How could something that small take such a hold of a person? She lifted it to her mouth and touched her tongue to it. It was bitter, like aspirin, and she thought she could feel it sizzling. In a day or two, it would begin to get easier: she believed this now. She was on the dividing line between one life and another and she need do nothing to cross it; the line was coming toward her. On the other side of it was a manageable pain, a clearer head, maybe even her own pillow and sheets. And, more importantly, she was going to need a clear head from here on in. There was a chance to save the man in the video; a chance to save “her,” whoever she was.
She went into the bathroom and flushed the pill down the toilet. It turned in smaller and smaller circles, arrowing in on something like it was supposed to do in the body, and then it was gone into the grey tube in the middle of the bowl as if down a throat and she pictured it streaming end over end into the sewer. From one bottomless place to another. It was progress.
She was in early on Friday morning and called a meeting with Wingate, Sergeant Geraldine Costamides, and Kraut Fraser. These were her most senior people now and she was going to need them. After confirming that nothing had changed on the website, she ushered them all into the office and closed the door behind them.
“Where are we with the prints from Eldwin’s house?” she began.
“I had to send the mouse down to Spere,” said Fraser. “It’s going to take more than powder to get a print off that thing.”
“Why?” She noticed Wingate was looking down at the ground.
“Well, your cubscout there was standing in a room full of things Eldwin’s touched, including a keyboard –”
“– how’m I supposed to smuggle a
keyboard
out of Eldwin’s house?”
“Anyway,” Fraser continued, “there are about two hundred imprints of the guy’s index finger all on the same spot –
click click click!
– a giant smudge where his thumb spends half its life, and a latent of half a pinky. Then there’s a partial print of the palm, from the base of the thumb. So Spere’s going to have to collect and collate digitally. He told me he’d have an answer by the end of the day.”
“Fine,” said Hazel, and she shot Wingate a look. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s focus on our next move.”
“Which is?”
“Geraldine, I have a job for you if you’re up for it.” Costamides turned her attention to her. Hazel didn’t get much chance to work with this sergeant, as Costamides preferred to work nights, but she liked her. “How’d you like to eat crow on behalf of your commanding officer?”
“I’m listening.”
“I browbeat Gordon Sunderland’s young deputy into cancelling yesterday’s instalment of ‘The Mystery of Bass Lake.’ I’d like you to go back over there and employ your charm in shaking loose the chapter that didn’t appear. And any others they’ve received since we visited their offices on Wednesday.”
“I think I can do that.”
Hazel knew she could. It was Gerry on whom the job of wrangling difficult favours often fell. She had a certain way of holding herself – solid and sad all at once – that made it hard for people to say no to her. The irony was that, unlike most people, Costamides did not have the face she deserved. She was one of the most joyful, vital people on the force. Hazel thanked her, and Costamides left right away for the newspaper’s offices.
“I’ll check up on Spere,” said Fraser, and he left too.
When the door was closed, Wingate said, “Sorry about the mouse. I didn’t know it would be that hard to get fingerprints off –”
“I told you not to worry about it,” she said, and she sat behind her desk.
“I’m sure Gerry will get you what you need from the
Record.”
“Yeah. She will.” She pulled the cellphone off the table and pocketed it. “In the good old days, I would have had Ray handle it. He could be subtle.” She shook her head sadly. “You know he sent me a bottle for my birthday.”
“That was nice of him.”
“I guess that means I should call.”
“Maybe you should,” said Wingate. “Maybe if …”
“Don’t finish that thought.”
He didn’t. “You know,” he said quietly, “back in Toronto, people didn’t get as close as you guys do up here. We didn’t live on top of each other.”
“It’s probably better that way.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “I like the sense that everything matters here. I like people taking things personally.”
“Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to take things personally in Port Dundas, James. Be careful what you wish for.” She was looking at the computer screen. The dripping
SAVE HER
was revealing itself anew. An awful lot of planning had gone into what they’d seen over the last seven days, almost as if the people who had uploaded this material knew their audience better than it knew itself. Hazel entertained, for just a moment, an inside element, someone within these walls who was communicating, either on purpose or unwittingly, with the perpetrators. But what made better sense was that the people
who were driving this macabre charade had a strong grasp of investigative process. They knew it would not take long after the mannequin was found for the police to make their way to the website. And at that point, they’d have the attention of the OPS for as long as they wanted it. It made her feel like there was a ghost sitting on her shoulder. That made her think of what was sitting on her other shoulder. “I don’t think I told you I met with Commander Willan. You know, Mason’s replacement?”
“You didn’t mention it. What’s he like?”
“Stalin with a surfboard.” She sighed. “He sees me as the rope bridge all you young folks are going to walk over to get to the promised land of efficient policing. He basically called me a dinosaur.”
“All the dinosaurs I’ve known were the best police, Hazel.”
“The dinosaurs may be good police, James, but they can never solve their own extinctions.”
Wingate found himself riven by the image of his superior officer looking crestfallen behind her desk. She seemed more defeated now than all the times he’d visited her at home, when she’d been in nearly unbearable pain, looking tiny on her couch in a terrycloth robe. “Skip? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Because you seem –”
“I know,” she said. “Apart from having a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on my desk, a CO who thinks I’ve outlived my usefulness, and expensive gifts coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem. And it appears I’m to quit in the midst of all this nonsense. So, I’m slightly less than okay.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Just do your job and don’t think about me. We need to get in front of this.”
“I should have thought through what I was doing at Eldwin’s.”
“You did. You’re not a dinosaur, remember that. Now go back to your desk and have a good think. At the rate things are going for that man in the chair, we all need to get on our game.”
Sergeant Geraldine Costamides had been successful, as Hazel knew she would. She returned to the station house looking slightly shame-faced, which meant that she’d spun a particularly good story for the benefit of Becca Portman and managed to shake loose everything they needed. There were two unpublished chapters now. Costamides made copies of them and passed them out to Hazel, Wingate, and Fraser. Then she stood at the lectern, her glasses hanging around her neck. She cleared her throat. “Are we ready? Everyone tucked in with their hot milk?” “Go ahead, Gerry,” said Hazel.
Costamides lifted her glasses clear of her long chin and settled them on the bridge of her nose. She curled the pages she held in her hands and clacked the bottom of them against the lectern before laying them flat. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” she began, “chapters four and five.”
Nick Wise had been sitting at his kitchen table, the newspaper open in front of him, his pen hovering over the page, when his
doorbell rang. Ah, he thought, “damaged,” but then there was the sound of a car driving off and he laid his pen down and went to the door.What he saw on his front stoop froze his blood. Wise looked hurriedly up and down the street, but there was no one and he quickly stepped around the form and got his arms under the greasy tarp. There was a note pinned to it with a fishhook, but it would have to wait until he got inside. He struggled with the weight and finally got it into his living room, rivulets of sweat running off his chin. Then he went back to the door and shut it hard, turning the lock and putting on the chain.
He stood in the hallway looking at the grey thing staining his fireplace rug. He’d moved away to make sure she’d never find him again, but here she was. The bitch. He leaned over the tarp and unpinned the note. It said, “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours.” He put the note aside and slipped his finger under the edge of the wet tarp and slid it back. It fell away from its contents with a wet slap against the floor and there she was, at least, there was most of her. She lay headless on his floor, immutable as an eternal verity. He reached behind himself and pulled a chair toward him. “What am I going to do with you?” he said. Brackish water was damaging his floor. She stank. He sighed heavily. “Fine. Wait here.”
He went out the back, across the big lawn to the garage, and got into his car. The old house was almost two hundred kilometres away, but obviously, whatever plans he had for a quiet afternoon were shot, so he might as well drive. Two hours later, entering the city, he felt like the past two years had never happened: he was still in that city, still living that life. He drove in
along the lakeside highway, up past the no-longer-new baseball stadium, through the bustle of Chinatown, and up into the university district. There, he turned onto Cherry Tree Lane, drove under the chestnut trees, and parked. Perhaps there had once been cherry trees here. Maybe the street was misnamed. He stood on his old front porch under one of the hundred-year-old chestnut trees and turned to take in the view he’d had for so many years: the two little parks, the old church. But there was no time for nostalgia: he had a mouldering body lying in his front room.A path in the alleyway between houses led to a gate. He pulled the little string that opened the latch and went into the little laneway separating them. There was a second gate leading into his old backyard; the same old string that lifted the latch hung out from between the slats. In the tiny yard behind – there had only ever been enough space there for a couple of tomato plants in tubs and maybe a little pot of basil – he went directly to the corner farthest away from the gate and got on his knees. Luckily, nobody walked back here and the soil was pretty loose, so he could dig at it with his hands. How he hated to get his nails all dirty, but this had to be done, and so he dug concertedly until his nails scraped against the top of something made of wood. He worked around the object until he’d revealed a little damaged casket big enough to hold a bowling ball.
No one had seen him. He knew people barely paid attention in cities. You could get away with anything in cities if you were just a bit careful. You could get away with murder.
He drove at a good clip back to the house, made it in ninety minutes, and parked in the rear. Before he went in, he grabbed
a little round tin from the shed in the garden, of the type that once held pastilles. Her body was exactly where he’d left it (he’d had, perhaps, an ounce of doubt about that, considering the fact that it had found its way to his house), and he kneeled beside it and opened the little wooden box. Her head – green, shrivelled, hollow – was inside. He laid it on the floor, face-up, pressing the two halves of her cut throat together. Dirt trickled out of her dry eye sockets. The little pastille tin was full of fishhooks and he used them to pin her head to her neck, a neat little row of black, gleaming stitches. When the last one was on, she sat bolt upright in her place and swivelled her face to him. Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel. “Hello, Nick,” she said. “Long time.”“Not long enough,” he said.
Sergeant Costamides laid the pages down flat and slipped her glasses off. “Well, that was interesting.”
Her audience appeared riveted. “Keep going,” said Hazel.
“I just want to get this straight. Someone has dropped off a two-year-old corpse at this gentleman’s house, and he’s not in the least surprised to see it, so he goes back to his old house –”
“– in Toronto,” said Wingate.
“Yes, and digs up the victim’s head so he can have a chat with her.”
Fraser studied his copy of the story. He said, “That seems to be it.”
“Okay,” said Costamides, and she smiled brightly at them. “Just checking. Chapter five.”
“What am I going to do with you?” said Nick Wise, leaning against his bathroom door. The dead girl was standing at his sink, gazing at herself in the mirror.
“I look like shit,” she said.
“You look like death warmed over.” She smiled at him in the reflection, one of those playful, sexy smiles that used to do wonders for him. It made him a little sad to see it, but he put the feeling aside. “I’m serious, sweetheart. You can’t be seen wandering around. People’ll talk.”
“I bet they will.” She opened his medicine cabinet and pushed aside a can of shaving cream and a bottle of Tylenol and lifted out a comb. She closed the mirror, and her face came back into view and she began to pull the comb through her twisted, ratty hair. It came out in clumps. “Goddamnit,” she said, “I had awesome hair.”
“I told you it was over between us, doll, but that wasn’t good enough for you. You could never take no for an answer.”
“You never said it was over, Nick.”
“Well, it was.”
“You never said it.” Her eyes rested on his in the mirror, knowing.
“Well, showing you didn’t fucking work either, did it? Because here you are.”
She turned away from the mirror now, and he saw her eyes were gleaming with tears. One rolled down a cracked, brown cheek, washing the dirt clean and revealing pink skin beneath. “But you called me back, Nick. Why did you do that? If you really didn’t want me anymore?”
“Just because I remember you doesn’t mean I want you.”
She was crying now, crying for real, and as the tears swept down her dirty cheeks, they wiped away the dry, encrusted dirt, and she was under there, her true face. Those round cheeks, the full, gentle mouth. Why would anyone have ever hurt her? When all she knew was how to love?
“Maybe you called me back for another reason? Maybe you had second thoughts?” She was walking backwards through the bathroom door, back into the house, her hands supplicating in front of her. “Maybe you really did want everyone to know about us?”
He was following her back into the living room, as if magnetized to her. He could not tell a lie: he remembered now how much he’d loved her, how, in the beginning, when they lived in that house together, he would have done anything for her. Why the heart runs out of fuel for loving was a mystery that had evaded him over and over in his life. He’d always been one to lose heart, to see his passions fade, and he’d never known why.
“Because you’ve never really made anything of yourself,” she said. She was standing over the tarp, and she was whole and unclothed, the way she was that night, that last night. She tilted her head at him and her luxuriant bronze hair fell over one breast. “But you had your chance, didn’t you?”
“I should have burned you up, so there was nothing left of you. I should have chopped you into little pieces –”
“Why didn’t you, Nick? Why didn’t you just have done with me and no one would ever have found me?”
“I won’t make that mistake again,” he said and he wheeled and strode into the kitchen to find his weapon. It was lying on its side on the counter beside the stove, and he snatched it up
and then went down the hall to his office. A sheaf of paper lay on his desk, months’ worth of work, and he strode back down the hall, brandishing it in front of him. In his other hand, he held the lighter.She saw him and laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it, Nick? I mean, it’s like you conjured me out of thin air and now you want to make me vanish again? Again? You’re just not that good, honey.”
He lit the paper and it flared in his hands like a magician’s trick. And then, just as quickly, it was ash at his feet and he was alone. The room was empty. The walls were blank. He was standing in a room with no windows and just a single closed door in one wall. The light flooded in and he looked up and she was standing above him now, towering over him, a giant, and she leaned her face down into the light, her angry, tearful face, and she almost blotted out the light. “You better hope they learn the truth about me before it’s too late, Nick.”
“Where am I?” he said, a note of fear finally creeping into his voice.
“Why, honey, you’re caught in a lie,” she said, and then she closed the lid of the box. In the deep, awful dark, he heard the door in the wall open.
A voice said, “You’re inside it now, aren’t you, Wise?”
Nick looked around. “Who … me?”
“Draw closer.”
He waited to hear more, but there was only silence and darkness.