The Taken (30 page)

“I’ve been up and down twice. God, you’re white as a sheet.”

“I ran down the stairs.”

“What? Why?”

“The elevator –” she said, but she couldn’t complete the sentence and had to lean forward and grip the steel frame of the door.

“Well, don’t stand there in the drizzle, then, come in. I’ll put on some coffee.”

Hazel caught her breath and straightened up. “No,” she said.

“No?
After all this?”

“I want you to wait here.”

Martha jerked her head back, her mouth creased in perfect confusion. “What?”

“No, you’re right. Come up with me.”

She led her daughter to the elevators, Martha behind her saying, “What the hell is going on?” but she didn’t answer her, just waited for the doors to open again, ready to tear the gun out of its holster. The elevator was empty and she ushered Martha in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I think someone might be stalking you.”

“What? Nobody is remotely that interested in me.”

The doors opened on the fourth floor and Hazel stepped out. “Wait in the hallway,” she said, but Martha strode around her mother, huffing, and unlocked her apartment door before Hazel could stop her. She had no choice: she rushed forward with the gun drawn and shoved past Martha in the doorway into the living room, spinning with her head tilted and the gun in front of her. She tossed the bag onto the coffee table and stood still, facing the hallway that connected the bedroom and the bathroom. The drawn gun had silenced Martha, and Hazel gestured her into the apartment and down onto the couch. She crept into the hallway and tried to sense movement in her periphery, but both ends of the hall seemed to be empty. She held a palm out behind her to warn Martha to stay where she was and then she moved silently toward the bedroom. It was a mess – anyone casing the apartment would think it had already been tossed – and Hazel could see there was no one in view in
the room. She knew Martha’s closet was so packed with crap that no one could hide in it, but she went to check it anyway. She could hear banker’s boxes groaning against the door and she only opened it halfway before closing it again. The bedroom was clear. She retreated down the hallway and heard “There’s no one in the bathroom either,” and she spun, her breath catching, and Martha was walking toward her. She put her index finger lightly on the gun barrel and pushed it down. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

“I got a call.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was from downstairs. That wasn’t me in the speaker-phone before. Someone recorded my voice.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“Someone was
here?’”

“They’re not here now, though,” said Hazel. “It’s okay now.”

Martha shook her head angrily and walked back into the living room. She sat heavily back onto the sofa. “Do you mean to say you keep track of my every move, imagining all kinds of harm coming to me,
living
in worry for me, but you didn’t know some creep with a recording of your voice might be paying me a visit?”

Hazel holstered the gun and sat across from Martha, unsure what to tell her. “It’s a live investigation, Martha. I had no idea it was even a possibility. Your dad’s name is on the lease, your number is unlisted. We did all that for a reason.”

“What was that reason again, Mum? Do you think all cops’ kids live in witness protection or something?”

“It was just a thought for your safety.”

“You would never have felt the need to do the same thing for Emilia.”

She’d come here worried for her daughter’s life and now, without so much as the wind changing, they were in familiar territory where Hazel couldn’t save Martha from anything. “I’m sorry,” she said now. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“So now what?”

“I think maybe you should come back home until all this is wrapped up.”

“No fucking way.”

“Martha –”

“I’m thirty-three,” her daughter said. “This is my home. How about I stay here and if it sounds like you’re downstairs, I’ll just pretend I’m not home.”

“Please, Martha.”

Her daughter said nothing. After a moment, the intercom buzzed and Martha blinked twice without moving. “You want to answer that or just shoot it?”

Hazel spiked the call button on the intercom. “Who is it?”

“I’m here,” said Wingate.

“We’ll be down in a minute,” she said. She disconnected and took Martha’s coat off the hook by the door. “I know how pissed off you are at me right now, but I have to insist. I don’t know if you’re safe here.”

After a moment, Martha pushed herself up from the couch, exactly the same gesture Hazel could see in her mind’s eye when, as a teenager, Martha had finally acquiesced to a higher power and reluctantly taken direction. She came to her mother and took the coat from her, lifted it into the air, and put it back on its hook.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said.

“Do you want to know who was here, Martha?” she said, finally furious. “He was a cop once, and right now he’s got a man tied to a chair in a basement somewhere. Although not all of the man. He cut his hand off and sent it to me in a box and then he sliced the man’s ears from the sides of his head and painted a wall with them.” Martha was blanching. “So it’s your choice: put on that fucking coat and come downstairs with me now, or keep your apartment locked up tight and hope he doesn’t know how to kick in a door.”

She told Wingate to take his time going down Broadview, she’d had enough fast living for one day. Martha sat in the back seat, looking out the window in silence.

Wingate spoke quietly. “What the hell happened back there?”

“Goodman happened. But I had her …”

“Who?”

“Joanne Cameron. She was at the house. She gave me this.” She held up the sweater in the evidence bag. “Then Goodman called from the bottom of Martha’s building.”

“Jesus.”

“We have to move quickly now. With the both of them down here – I don’t know what he might do next.”

“That’s the sweater from the picture?”

“Supposedly it proves that Colin Eldwin killed Brenda Cameron.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you something: we lucked out with Toles. He’s not the sharpest biscuit in the tin and he’s probably the only guy at Twenty-one who doesn’t know that
Goodman made detective and then went berserk. We have to keep it quiet, but if we can get him to handle the sweater for us, we might have some new evidence we can go to the superintendent with.”

“You sound like you’re onside now, Hazel.”

“I’m getting close. Joanne Cameron is consumed by grief, but Goodman hasn’t put a foot wrong since he sank that mannequin in Gannon. Everything he’s done has been considered and carefully executed. I don’t like him, but he’s too smart to be a loose cannon and if he’s spent three years looking for someone to bring this to Twenty-one’s doorstep again …”

“What? We owe it to him to carry it over the goal line?”

“No,” said Hazel. “We owe it to Joanne Cameron. This woman has lost everything. She deserves an answer.”

“She got her answer, Hazel. If you’re right, he convinced her to disregard it and if she did, that was her decision. Why is it our problem?”

“Because we caught the case, James. And we should see it through.”

“If this is as you say, we’re not going to be welcome at Twenty-one much longer.”

“That’s why we need Toles onside and Ilunga in the dark.”

They drove to the bus terminal on Bay Street and Hazel bought Martha a one-way ticket to Port Dundas. Her daughter didn’t argue at all. “I’ll call your father to pick you up,” she said. “He’ll be happy to see you.”

“What makes you think this guy won’t show up in Port Dundas?”

“He’s not leaving Toronto while I’m still here.”

“How does he know you’re still here?”

“He just does,” she said.

They waited until the bus moved out onto Edward Street and made its turn south toward the expressway. “Let’s see if Toles feels like having a coffee,” she said.

Toles met them in the Tim’s. He’d brought Lana Baichwell’s file, like she asked him to. “You been here the whole time?” he asked. “I didn’t realize you guys were from Quebec,” he said, smiling.

“Uhh?” said Hazel.

“A two-hour lunch? I just figure you must be French.”

“Well, actually,” said Hazel, “something interesting came up.” She lowered her voice. “I think we found our girl.”

Toles reached carefully into a small black portfolio and drew out the file. “This one, eh?”

Hazel took the file and opened it. “She went over the side of the
Ongiara
on July 10, 2002. We’ve come across some evidence that she might have been pushed.”

“Really. Like what?”

She nodded to Wingate, who produced the sweater. She took it from him and handed it over to Toles. “We can’t talk about our source yet, but if you can get that down to your lab and there’s the wood or varnish we expect to find on it, then I think we’re going to want to establish some kind of joint force to carry forward. And you’re already attached, Detective.”

“I hear you.”

“It might be a way of getting in good.”

Toles looked thoughtful, running his tongue around the inside of his bottom lip. “I went to school with one of the girls in the hair and fibres department at CFS. I could talk to her this afternoon.”

“How well do you know her, Danny?” asked Hazel.

“What do you mean?”

“Would she rush a job just for you?”

He smiled, happy to have his other charms noted. “It wouldn’t hurt to ask.” He held up the evidence bag. “Why don’t you two keep having your lunch. I’ll see what my girl can do for us.”

They hadn’t actually had a first lunch, and they were both starving. Wingate knew a decent sandwich shop over on Adelaide Street, and they ordered and sat in the window looking over the sidewalk.

Hazel tore off a piece of her club sandwich. If she lived in Toronto, she could have bacon every day and her mother would never know. “You have a good talk with Superintendent Ilunga?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was good to catch up.”

“I get the feeling they really care for you down here.”

“Yeah,” he said. That wall of his was going up again. She decided to plow through it.

“I didn’t realize you’d been down here for less than two years. I thought it had been longer.”

“I did the exam in January 2003. I’d been in Etobicoke since the academy; they thought I had promise for CIB.”

“You do.”

“I guess so.”

The sandwich shop was almost empty: people ate and worked on a strict schedule in this part of town. He wasn’t taking on the unasked question and she was going to have to ask it. “So, James. You left. Why did you leave? Why did you get as far away from here as you could?”

He kept his eye on the world beyond the window. “The superintendent wanted to know if I’d consider coming back.”

“That’s what he wanted to talk to you about?”

“He was wondering if I thought enough time has passed.” She put her hand on his forearm to bring him back into the room with her and he looked down at her hand. “I lost my partner,” he said. “Just over a year ago, in fact. April 12 last year.”

“God … I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“Did it happen on the job?”

“No,” he said, and he glanced at her. His eyes were shining. “He wasn’t a police, Hazel. That’s not the kind of partner I’m talking about.”

The blood left her face. “Oh shit,” she said. “Oh god, James, I didn’t know –”

He nodded. “His name was David. They beat the hell out of him on the boardwalk in front of Queen’s Quay at one in the morning. A Wednesday night. He was walking our dog. We lived in one of the condos across from Harbourfront. There were witnesses, but they didn’t do anything. They were too scared, I guess. Six guys swarmed him, they hit him with everything they could get their hands on: bottles, a couple of chairs from one of the patios, they kicked his ear into his skull. Then they toed him over the walkway and into the lake. They killed Grace – the dog – too, as if she could have identified them.” He slid his eyes over hers and then looked back out the window, toward the lake. “When I learned this whole case was going to focus on the lake here, I just wanted to get in my car and drive. As far away as I could. Again.”

“James.”

He coughed into his hand. “This detail about the Cameron case, the water in her lungs, it, you know …”

“What?”

“It just makes me want to die.”

She could feel the heat radiating off him, as if finally telling her his secret had set him on fire.

“Did they catch them?”

“One of them.” He was far away now, and strangely calm. “Brought him in, put him in one of the holding cells downstairs after they booked him. They told me where he was. There was no one at intake, but there was a key on the desk. I took off my gun and my stick and left them on the table.”

“What happened?”

“He lived. Then he went to prison. Second degree. He’ll be paroled in four more years, the rest of them are out there somewhere.”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off the passing show, but that was all he was going to say. She was trying to get more experience showing the people she cared for that she really did love them, but even at Martha’s apartment, despite her fear for the girl’s life, it had taken an effort. That was who she was: her love stayed inside her too much. She was nothing like Brenda Cameron, nothing like that dead girl’s mother. The hot core of another person had always frightened her. She preferred relationships that didn’t have to be plumbed, that could be resolved in guilt or innocence. This was neither, these crimes James Wingate had just described to her, a murder and an assault, and she didn’t know what to say.