The Taken (33 page)

“What’s wrong? Who’s in the street?”

“Goodman. He was just here. He’ll be on the sidewalk any second now.”

“I don’t un –”

“
GO
!” She hung up on him and went to the window, but she had a view of the wrong side of the building. She was pouring sweat and her legs felt weak. She pushed open the window and looked down to see if Goodman was running down the alley between buildings, but the alleyway was empty and all she could hear was the sounds of traffic out on the boulevard. She pushed her face out into the air as far as the window would
allow and felt the wind against her, against her living flesh. She craned her head toward the front of the hotel, but if their man was out there, he wasn’t making a scene. She imagined Wingate bursting out onto the sidewalk brandishing his sidearm and the people there suddenly flying apart in panic. And she knew he would find nothing: Goodman would have melted into the stream of people heading back to work after their lunches, he would already have transformed into Dean Bellocque, perfectly invisible because he didn’t exist.

A minute later, Wingate knocked at her door and she let him in. “I couldn’t …” He leaned over, winded. She let him catch his breath. “What was he doing here? What did he want?”

“He was in my room,” she said. “He was waiting for me here, for
fuck’s
sake.”

“My God, Hazel. Are you okay?”

“He tackled me. He held a gun to my head.”

Wingate sat on the end of the bed. He stayed motionless for many moments, and when he raised his eyes, they were bloodshot. He saw the vomit on the bedspread and looked at her searchingly. “What the hell did he want?”

“He wanted to give me one more chance to see things from his point of view.”

“Did you?”

“What do you think?”

They fell to silence and she thought she could hear both of their hearts thudding. She blew a jet of air out from pursed lips. “We have to get out of here. I don’t think Eldwin’s got much time left.”

“I’ll get the car.”

“I’m going to wash my face,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside in three minutes.”

She turned on the too-bright light over the sink and shielded her eyes until the pounding it caused subsided. She felt dazed and overwhelmed. The thought of getting back into the car and making that long drive home, having to start the paperwork, initiating what was bound to be a long and difficult process of ending or suspending this sad affair – it made her want to go to sleep on the spot. When this was over, she realized, there was going to be no one to hand the finished thing to, no one to succour with the result. Because that was what an investigation was, it was a
work
, like a painting, and at the end of it, someone looked at it and saw what you’d done and knew you’d seen it through. But an unfinished work … who wanted that?

She ran cold water in the sink and cupped her hands under the flow. It sluiced over her mouth and cheeks and she pushed her hands up into her hair. Her eyes looked as if someone had pressed their thumbs into them and driven them into her skull. She was exhausted. She was spent. In the middle of her forehead, she saw the perfectly round, fading pink imprint of her own gun-barrel, a target pointing to the part of her that had failed. The pale circle was like a hazy sun hanging over a body of water and she imagined gulls circling her eyes. That was where all this had begun: at water’s edge. She’d been waiting in the cruiser while Wingate was in the boat. No idea what would be waiting for them down there, what it would mean to them. The boat had come back and the two wetsuits – what were their names, Tate and someone? – had hauled something off
the boat wrapped in green netting. She’d hobbled down to the dock to take a closer look and Tate had peeled away the covering for her to see the plastic body within. “Someone was holding it down there, made sure it wasn’t going anywhere,” he’d said, and she looked at him, and the marks his scuba mask had made around his eyes made him look like a raccoon.

She looked at her own eyes again, the mark on her forehead. Her stomach fell two storeys.

She rushed downstairs, where Wingate was waiting in one of the chairs in the lobby. “What is it?”

“There’s something I want to do.”

“What is it?”

“Alone.”

He hesitated a moment. “Do you want me to wait?”

“No. I want you to get back to town. Get every available car out looking for Goodman or Cameron. I’ll be back tonight.”

The Ward’s Island ferry was loading when she got to the docks at three-fifteen, men and women and children weighed down with everything imaginable it could take to make a Tuesday afternoon on an overcast May day better. Bikes and rollerblades and kites with their strings wound tight, kids dabbed with hopeful sunblock, the granola locals with their organics, headed for home. She knew only a little bit about what was called the island “Community,” but she understood it to be a tight-knit group of middle-class back-to-earthers and urban pioneers. They were living on city land, though, which in turn was also laid claim to by an aboriginal group, and every few years, the pot boiled over and you read of lawsuits and petitions and people saying things like “possession is nine-tenths”: exactly the thing people said when they wanted to get away with straight-up theft. She wondered why the folks who were buying up the land around Goodman’s place weren’t these people, seeking peaceful enclaves, instead of the rich idiots who drove huge, disgusting cars and built cottages to impress others.

She’d rather a self-satisfied urban fool than the kinds of poisonous money that found its way north.

But just the same, she sort of knew these people. They were the ones who made a fetish of sticking up for the community, as if such a thing
shouldn’t
be second nature; they were the ones who helped their neighbours paint their houses and look for lost cats. They were socially
conscious
, whatever that meant, and she was going to have to use it to her benefit this afternoon.

She sat on the upper deck, watching the docks and the high-rises of downtown Toronto recede. They were calling for three days of rain now and there were stormclouds in the east and a telltale curtain of grey reached down somewhere over the eastern suburbs. Someone in town who still swore by
The Farmer’s Almanac
had told her that the summer of 2005 was going to be the wettest on record. Maybe the almanac would be right for once.

The boat moved over the surface of the water like a huge innertube, bobbing and tilting, and once they’d reached the centre of the harbour, she thought of Lana Baichwell, waiting for the right moment. She had to push the image of the dead woman’s swollen face out of her mind.

As the water passed under the boat, throwing up its white foam, she took out the autopsy photos she’d stolen from Room 32. She looked closely at them again. Brenda Cameron’s eyes were half open, that expression of the mindlessly dead, one eye hidden beneath its lid. The mark from hitting her forehead as she went over the side of the boat was almost exactly centred above her eyes, and symmetrical. The mark on her own forehead, the one Dana Goodman had imprinted on her, was just a
random thing, his choice of where to put the gun barrel, but as she looked in the hotel mirror, the question had come to her mind: what had actually made the mark on Brenda Cameron’s forehead? Bumping one’s head on the way out of a tilting boat would have been a
moving
injury; it would have broken the skin and left an abrasion. The marks on Cameron’s head – and the closer she looked at them the more they looked like miniature griddle marks – were perfectly even, as if someone had carefully pressed something against her head. And the symmetry of the marks, like a Rorschach blot …

The boat arrived at the Ward’s Island dock about three minutes later, and she watched the forward deck disgorge its eager band of locals and merrymakers. They flowed forward onto a road that soon forked off, and she slowly made her way to the stairs that led down and out. There was a building with a café in it straight ahead on an emerald patch of lawn. She recalled that the file had stated that the owner of the stolen boat was a man named Peace Swallowflight, a name not exactly hard to memorize, and that, in 2002, he lived on 6th Street. She hoped the slow turnover of houses on the island would work in her favour and that Swallowflight would still be a resident. She went to the café and ordered a coffee and the tall, pierced girl behind the counter passed the time of day with her. When she offered Hazel a refill, the girl said, “Come a long way for your coffee break, huh?”

It had been so long since she’d worn her uniform more than a few hours at a time that she’d forgotten what she looked like.

“Almost two hundred kilometres,” Hazel said.

“I know the coffee is good, but …”

Hazel smiled. “You know a Peace Swallowflight?”

“Yeah. But he didn’t do it.”

That was strange. “Didn’t do what?”

“Whatever it is you’re investigating. He’s the island sensei. He wouldn’t steal a glance, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do. I’m not here to accuse him of anything. I just want to talk to him.”

“Well, he’s right there,” the girl said, pointing through the window and over the porch. “That’s the back of his house.” She was indicating a wooden structure close to the shoreline, festooned with prayer wheels and colourful flags.

“Thanks,” said Hazel.

“What’s this about?”

“He’s not in trouble,” she said, putting down a toonie.

She crossed the grass again, cutting diagonally to the top of 6th Street. She walked down to the bottom of the street. The front of Swallowflight’s house was somehow even more antic than the back, the porch busy with pinwheels and silk windsocks and spinning colourful plates. It looked like the house couldn’t sit still. She went up the steps and was about to knock on the frame of the screen door when a tall, muscular man in long pink pants and a tank top appeared in the hallway. His bare scalp gleamed. “Hello,” he said, pushing the door open as if he expected her. “Come in.”

“Did someone call you?” she asked.

“No, but I saw you make a beeline from the café. I was upstairs sewing up a hole.” He pinched his pant leg, a light linen weave that now had a line of yellow thread traversing the knee. “They’re too comfortable to throw out, you know?”

“Okay,” she said. His manner was calming and off-putting all at once. “What’s a ‘sensei’?”

“It just means ‘teacher,’” he said. “I teach meditation.” He stood away from the door. She realized she was apprehensive. Something smelled like burning grass. “Come on in.”

He led her into the house and she sat on a futon couch in the large living room. It looked out along the shoreline toward where the ferry had docked. He stood in front of her, his head tilted just a little as if he was thinking of painting her, and then he left the room, holding a finger up. He returned with a tray holding two rubber-gripped glasses of tea.

“This will calm your nerves a little.”

“My nerves?”

He sat across from her and held a glass out. “You’re practically your own siren, Officer. There are brilliant flashes of red and green going off behind your head.”

She took the tea and sipped it; it was pleasant if a little bitter. She put it down on the low table in front of her. “I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

“The stone is never disturbed by the river.”

“I’m sorry?”

“An inner stillness can never be disturbed, is what I mean. I don’t control the river. In other words, you’re not disturbing me, Officer.”

“Detective Inspector,” she said.

He blinked twice in quick succession. “How can I help you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about a stolen rowboat.”

“You think I stole a boat?”

“No. I’m talking about the one that was stolen from you.”

“Oh,” he said, sadly. “You’re here about Brenda Cameron.”

“I am.”

“That poor girl.”

“Mr., um, Swallowflight, I don’t suppose you still have the boat, do you?”

He was swirling his tea lightly in his hand. “I still have it,” he said. “I don’t use it, though. I can feel her on it.”

“What do you mean you can ‘feel’ her?”

“The room where a person dies … something lingers there. That’s all I mean.”

“Where is the boat?”

“They were here, you know. They did all this already. In 2002. For two weeks
I
was a suspect. How do you think that felt?”

She put the tea down with a neat
clack
on the tabletop. “It must have felt good when they ruled you out.”

“I was out of the city when she died.”

“I know all this, Mr. Swallowflight. You’re not a suspect.”

He sighed, blowing his cheeks out. He didn’t look so peaceful anymore. “People respect me here,” he said quietly.

“Where is it?”

“Under the back deck.”

She stood up, her forearms tingling. “Let’s go.”

He led her out around the side of the house to the back. Hazel cast a look over the water. It would have been easy for Brenda to take the ferry from downtown and walk along the shoreline to the bottom of 6th Street. Swallowflight’s backyard was open to the water, but the house itself blocked a view of the rest of the street. Stealing a rowboat from his yard under the cover of darkness would have been child’s play. He leaned under his deck and was about to pull the boat out when she stopped him.
“Do you mind putting these on?” she said, passing him a pair of latex gloves she’d pocketed in the station house. “I’d drag it out myself, but I have a bad back.”

He looked at the gloves uneasily, as if they implicated him in something, and then put them on. He went under the deck and she heard the sound of a metal hull scraping against the white pebbles that lined the dark space underneath. The simple rowboat emerged behind him. She watched the knobs of his spine shifting. The boat was a flat-bottomed number with a white fibreglass interior. There was no seat. “Where does a person sit in this thing?” she asked.

“Milk carton,” he said. “You want that, too?”

“No,” she said. “This’ll be fine. How long have you had the boat?”