The Taken (34 page)

“I found it junked at the back of Hanlan’s Point about six years ago. Bottom was rusted through in a couple of places and I put this insert in.” He ran his latexed hand along the white interior. “I sealed up the rust and riveted this into place, but it still leaked.”

She got down on her knees and looked closely at the insert. It followed the contours of the boat, including the three runnels in its bottom. But she could see he’d done a poor job of sealing it and the bottom of the insert was springy rather than tight against the hull. There was a slip-proof pattern on it which matched the mark on Brenda Cameron’s forehead. “Do you still have the oars?”

He went back under the deck and brought out two standard wooden oars, their metal pins dangling from midshaft. She gestured that he should put them down on the grass and she kneeled over them, blinking to clear her eyes, and stared hard at
one of the shafts. After three years of disuse, they were covered in a thin layer of dust and the varnish was cracked. Thin edges of it stood up where it was beginning to flake away. Examining these oars would be like trying to dust sand for fingerprints and she blew as lightly as she could at the surface to loosen the dust. The translucent layers of varnish rattled like dragonfly wings.

She stilled her attention to take in just a couple of square inches of the oar. Flecks of grit and thin filaments of fibre came in and out of focus among the yellowy parchment-like varnish. Some of the fibre was bits of old spider webbing, or dust strung up in some strange order. But there were also tiny strands of black fibre as well. She narrowed her eyes and tried to filter out everything but the black and as she did, more of it appeared, like a detail popping out of a landscape. She saw it accumulating – tiny black exclamation points – until it became a pattern and the pattern was heaviest in the middle of the oar, the thin part, and then its density diminished as she traced it down toward the blade. The marks stopped about six inches from the end of the blade. She turned to the other oar, but it was clean and she stared at it a moment until she realized she was looking at the wrong side. She used two sticks to turn it over: the same pattern – almost a mirror image – of black fibre ran down the shaft to within six inches of the end of the blade. A drop of rain hit the oar and instantly the fibres within the drop leapt to life.

“Mr. Swallowflight, did you lend this boat out to friends, or would you say you were the main person to use it?”

“A lot of people used it. Not these days, though. Back then.” She stared at the oars. He leaned in closer behind her. “What is it?”

“A murder,” she said, wiping her cheek. The rain was beginning to come down heavier. “Can I use your phone?”

Ilunga was standing far behind his desk, as if he wanted to vanish through the wall behind him. His right arm was crossed stiffly over his chest and he seemed to be choking the life out of his left bicep. He was furious. On the phone, he wouldn’t even entertain dispatching any of his SOCO people. If she wanted to talk to him, she’d have to come in, and then he hung up. Now he was looking at her as if trying to decide what part of her to rip off first. “I told you to go home.”

“And I think we told you we don’t need your permission to investigate a crime in Ontario.”

“This isn’t Ontario, this is Toronto.”

“Superintendent, are you hiding something?”

His mouth was half open, like he was going to reply, but then he sat and dragged Cameron’s folder toward him. “Where are the pictures that go with this file?”

“I have no idea.”

“We interviewed this Swallowflight faggot, we examined the boat – it’s
all
in the file, Detective Inspector – we found the dead girl’s earring
in the boat
and we made a ruling of suicide. We
found
the girl’s fingerprints on the bloody oars, as well as Swallowflight’s –
which
you would expect, it being his boat – however he was in New Orleans the entire month taking a course in …” He flipped angrily through the file. “In
self-hypnosis
. Which skill it would seem you have an advanced understanding of.”

“She was drowned in the boat, not in the lake.”

He stared at her.

“The marks on her forehead. They came off the bottom of the fibreglass insert Swallowflight used to seal the hull.”

“She
hit
her head on the way out of the boat,” said Ilunga.

“How does she hit her head on the bottom of the boat? Do
you
jump out of a boat backwards? Try to see what you’re saying. And the marks are not abrasions.” She took the victim’s photo out of her pocket and slid it across the desk. He looked at it, then at her, and then back down at the picture. “This is an
impression
. Someone held her head down. One inch of water in the hull was all it would have taken.”

“Then put someone else in the boat, Micallef. Give me a second person on that boat and we can talk.”

“I think I can.”

“How?”

“If your forensics people fingerprinted the oars, then I presume they noted the presence of black fibres? They were all over the oars.”

“The presence of only one type of fibre is proof that Cameron was
alone
in the boat. The fibres are trace transfers. She rowed the boat out, the oars brushed up against her sweater. Then she stopped the boat, bumped her head on the bottom of it fumbling about while flying on alcohol and sedatives, and then she
jumped out
. And drowned.” He shoved the picture back toward her. “You think I’ll do anything to close a file, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You should look at yourself. We
investigated
this death. You arrived here with a foregone conclusion.”

“I’m not sure you’re talking about me now.”

“What I do here, what I’m doing, is standing my ground against the devil, who appears before us in the form of an intuition. Every time someone walks in here with a
feeling
, I want to reach for my gun. You know how much a hunch costs?”

“I know you’re going to tell me.”

“A SOCO team and a vehicle big enough to get that boat and its oars back to a clean room, the hours to
re
photograph the goddamned thing, the spectroscope, the
re
fingerprinting of latents now three years old … I’ll start at thirty thousand, but I’m being optimistic.”

“So it’s the cost that bothers you? Or the revelation that you accepted a suicide rap because it’s good for business? Are you going to ignore new evidence to keep your record?”

“I’m going to call OPS Central and tell them how you run an investigation. They might want to reopen
your
cases.”

“Swallowflight told me he used to let people take the boat out. To borrow it if they wanted. He’s that kind of
sharing
person, you know.”

Ilunga was as still as a statue, his eyes glowing white. “So what,” he said.

“So your dusters looked for the victim’s fingerprints and noted significant repeats, meaning the owner of the boat. The rest were incidentals. They were leaning toward suicide anyway and there was no chance that there were a dozen people in the boat with Cameron that night. It was a sound conclusion, suicide.”

“I see … and now you want me to fingerprint all of Ward’s Island? Get alibis for twenty people between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the evening of August 4, 2002?”

“No,” she said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh. You tell me what I have to do then.”

She got up from her chair. “Nothing.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Nothing?”

“You’ll know what to do next.”

“Oh, really.”

“I’d like you to get someone to drive me back to Port Dundas. Maybe Childress, since she’s probably the only person left here who doesn’t want to push me out a window.”

“I doubt that. She still works for me.”

She approached the desk and leaned on it, getting in his face. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to show you something that will allow you to draw your own conclusions. Because you’re tired of listening to reason. Now: Childress?”

“Take the bus.”

“I’m going to need her,” Hazel said. “Jurisdictional issues, you know.” She looked at her watch. “Have her meet me at the Day’s Inn on Adelaide in half an hour.”

“How do people work with you, Micallef?” he said, his pupils tiny black dots. “You’re ungovernable.”

“The stone is never disturbed by the river,” she said, smiling sweetly.

Childress had driven Hazel back to Port Dundas in a frosty silence. Even when checking her blind spot on the right, Childress made an effort not to look at her. They put her up in Dianne MacDonald’s B&B and asked Dianne to let them know if it looked like the officer was planning to leave. Martha was meanwhile fuming in Glynnis and Andrew’s house, yet another storm on the horizon. But she was here, and that was all that mattered to Hazel now.

She woke up early and went into the station house. She called Jack Deacon and told him to pack Eldwin’s hand in a
lot
of ice and courier it down, same-day, to Twenty-one addressed to Superintendent Peter Ilunga. She instructed him to label it “
EVIDENCE
” and “
PERISHABLE
.” They had their own set of fingerprints from the hand, but she thought Ilunga deserved the chance to draw his own conclusions. It was too bad she couldn’t be there when he opened the box.

It was a quiet midweek at the detachment. She’d instructed Wingate to pick up Claire Eldwin and bring her in. It was time she knew the whole story, and Hazel wanted her in the station house to hear it. She’d been of two minds whether to tell Eldwin the full extent of the kind of trouble her husband was in, but she’d never been totally sure of the seriousness of the danger. Now she was, and Claire Eldwin had a right to know. Wingate was spending the morning writing up a full report of what they’d done in Toronto, something she deemed essential considering how far under Ilunga’s skin they were now. They might need to tell their side at some point, and having the official report was necessary. She knew Wingate’s report would be measured, accurate, and sober. When he told her Mrs. Eldwin had elected to come in under her own steam, it looked like it was going to be at least a couple of hours before she arrived and Hazel took the opportunity to have some downtime. She decided to go home for lunch and wait until Wingate called to say Eldwin was at the detachment.

The rain was, if anything, heavier here than it had been in Toronto and she dashed to the front door of the house and let herself in. It was midday quiet and still; a kind of stillness that made her nervous, given what she’d found in her hotel room the day before. It would have been nice to have some company, but her mother and Martha had gone out in the morning and the house was as empty as it sounded.

She popped two pieces of whole-wheat bread into the toaster. To make up for the healthy amount of fibre, she took a half-eaten wheel of Camembert out of the fridge and left it on the counter to temper for a few minutes.

There was nothing of interest in the mail except for a forwarded property tax bill for her house in Pember Lake. Westmuir kept reassessing the house at higher and higher levels and this year had it at $325,000. A similar house less than a kilometre away had sold for $260,000 in January. She didn’t mind paying her taxes – after all, it was tax money that paid her salary – but it made her sick that the county was helping itself to thirty percent extra with its upbeat evaluations. Too bad there wasn’t a law that you could sell your house back to Westmuir for what they claimed it was worth.

The toaster dinged and she cut three big slabs of cheese onto each piece and sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t realized until now how tired she was. The buzziness of a week without Percocet had finally begun to die down – keeping busy had helped her ignore the jitters during the last few days – and she felt like the world around her was beginning to emit its real colours again. What a strange dream the last two months had been. Living in this house, half out of her mind in pain, depressed, hopeless at times. But now she was sitting at Glynnis Crombie’s – all right, Pedersen’s – kitchen table, in full uniform, thinking about the day ahead of her. She was escaping the immediate present, a state of mind that paid no heed to tomorrow, that hardly believed in it. She was shaking loose the bonds. It seemed to her now that days and weeks lay ahead of her, a topography of tasks and battles and puzzles and outcomes. She realized she felt calm and prepared for the first time since Christmas.

She worked her way through one melting, fragrant piece of toast and was picking up the second when she heard a sound from downstairs. She stilled her hand midway to her mouth
and listened. There it was again. Something being pushed around on the floor. And now a voice.
Good Christ
. She put the toast back down on the plate, picked her chair up to move it silently back, and slipped her reloaded gun from its holster. No one would take it from her now, by god. At the door to the basement, she could hear more clearly now: faint bumps, gentle clattering, a murmur. A woman’s voice, she was fairly certain. She breathed shallowly by the door, her hand wrapping the knob silently, opening it into the dark stairwell. She stepped down, once, twice, stepped over the creaky third step, and then down again, but the fifth step emitted its low groan and she stopped on it, her heart pounding. The sounds from below abruptly stopped.
Jesus
, she thought.
I should have gone around the back and come in through the door with the Glock out
. There were footsteps approaching the bottom door.
Fucking hell
. She brought the gun up to chest height. A high-pitched hum filled her head. Below her, the door opened.

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

“Goddamnit,” Hazel said, lowering the gun and leaning against the wall. “What are you doing down here?”

“You sure you don’t want to shoot me first?” said Martha. She turned sideways to allow her mother to answer her own question. There were boxes opened and in various states of being filled around the room. “Nanna gave me a job.”