The Taken (36 page)

Claire Eldwin’s face was streaked red and white, her hands wrapped tightly around a water glass. On the table between them was the cage with the mouse in it.

“What’s that mouse doing here?” Hazel asked Wingate.

“I just … she was crying. I thought an animal might calm her down.”

She sat at the end of the table. Mason was sniffing the air. “Did it?”

“No,” said Claire Eldwin. “Is it true the man who kidnapped my husband sent this poor animal in a box to you?”

Hazel hesitated; she didn’t know if Eldwin knew about her husband’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “He did. It wasn’t … very nice. But he’s okay now.”

“Who?”

“The mouse. Mason.”

Claire Eldwin put her hand out toward the cage and put a finger between the bars. Mason pushed himself up against an opposite corner. “This is my husband,” she said. “In a cage
somewhere.” She looked up at Hazel and began to cry again. “I take back everything I ever said about him … I just want him home. Why haven’t you found him?”

“We’re close, Mrs. Eldwin. We are. We have … we know the man who abducted him.”

“You know who he is, or you
have
him? Which is it?” She was quivering as if someone had run an electric current through her.

“We don’t have him. Either of them, actually. Brenda Cameron’s mother is involved as well. They believe Colin killed Brenda. Murdered her.”

“Colin would never have laid a hand on anyone. Not that way.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Eldwin, but I’m not sure now. In my line of work we see, time and again, that people don’t really know those closest to them.”

“I know Colin.”

“I feel terrible about the situation he’s in, but I still don’t know what to think. Is there anything you haven’t told us? About your life together in Toronto, about the night Brenda Cameron died? You told the police Colin was home with you, but did you notice anything strange? Was he behaving in a manner different than usual?”

Claire Eldwin’s face had hardened. “These people abduct Colin, and your way of finding my husband is by investigating their claims?”

“It’s been impossible to do it any other way.”

“Colin’s done nothing. You’ll see. He’s not necessarily a good person, but he’s not a murderer. At heart, he’s a coward and he looks for the easy way out. Killing a girl? He could never have done it.”

“Did you know Brenda Cameron?”

“No.”

“We’re not sure she was alone in that boat.”

“Colin was at home with me all that night. The police
questioned
him, you know. They
came
to the house and questioned him. You should know all this.”

“I know it,” said Hazel.

“Then what are you
doing
to get him home?”

“Everything we can.”

Claire Eldwin searched Wingate’s face, hoping to find reassurance there, but she came up empty. Quietly, she said, “What’s ‘everything’?”

She’d decided to spare Claire Eldwin the details for now. She already looked like she was going to faint. “Everything,” repeated Hazel.

They led her down the back hall that passed behind the pen and Wingate showed her out of the station house. Hazel took him aside and asked him to follow her and make sure she got home. He went to his cruiser and followed Eldwin out of the parking lot. Hazel watched them pass through the rain down Porter Street on their way toward the highway, Claire Eldwin hunched over her steering wheel, her eyes blank. The woman had already seen too much, Hazel thought, and now there was this, an uncertainty more awful than any she’d experienced with her husband before now. She watched the two cars moving off toward the house in Mulhouse Springs.

She went back to her office and sat behind her desk. She checked the website one more time, but the camera had been turned off and the site returned a black square, a fitting
monument to the entire case. It had been a case about faith, bad faith and broken hearts. She wondered silently to herself how often in the last ten days images of love destroyed had passed through her mind, her own hopeless love for Andrew, the broken marriage that was Colin and Claire Eldwin, Wingate’s murdered partner, the unimaginable sadness that had driven Joanne Cameron to tie the last of her hopes to a rogue cop who probably loved nothing but his own convictions. She realized that she’d allowed herself to think of the relationship between Bellocque and Paritas as a sort of silver lining for Joanne Cameron: someone to love in the midst of her grief. But as soon as she had that thought, she recognized that it, too, was a lie: the affair between the two of them was strictly business. Cameron had been right all along insisting he wasn’t her boyfriend.

For some reason, this thought ticked over into an image of Wingate following Claire Eldwin home, the both of them driving slowly, like a cortege without a body. She fixated on the image of the two cars, and in her mind’s eye, she saw two other cars … She fumbled for her notebook and read through her notes from the Barlow and Paritas interviews. Barlow had mentioned her clients had arrived in separate cars and Paritas – Cameron – had confirmed it when she’d angrily denied that she and Bellocque lived together. She should have paid much more attention to that denial: they didn’t live together, they had never been lovers, and now she realized it was important. She hurriedly got Wingate on the radio. “Come back,” she said.

“I’m not in Mulhouse Springs yet.”

“I know where Colin Eldwin is being held.”

“It’s the first thing we should have thought of when we figured out her name,” Hazel said, signalling her turn onto Highway 121. “We slipped.”

“We had other things on our plate.”

They’d found nothing under Cameron’s name in Gilmore, but the third real estate office they’d called told them a Joanne Cameron was paying the rent on a house let to a Nick Wise. Hazel had practically levitated out of her seat. “Too tidy for their own good,” she said.

“Unless they want us to find them,” said Wingate.

The clicking of the turn signal did time with the windshield wipers. They’d taken an unmarked vehicle, but in the increasing downpour she doubted anyone would have made them anyway. She turned east and took the car up to 140 kilometres per hour, holding the wheel tight.

“And meanwhile, another day has gone by and god knows what kind of shape Eldwin is in,” she said.

They reached Highway 191 in fifteen minutes and turned north. It sounded like demons pounding the roof of the car. The address was 28 Whitcombe Street in Gilmore. They passed Goodman’s falling-down rented shack on the way into town, slowing down to get a look. It was dark, as expected. She knew instinctively that he’d never return to that place. Three years waiting for a sign. That was how strong his conviction had been, how strong his obsession. Not even grief has that kind of staying power, Hazel thought. He’d divided his time between Toronto and Gilmore waiting for Eldwin to show his hand. It hadn’t mattered to Goodman if the hand held something or not: he’d only wanted a reason to act.

And he’d gotten to Hazel. She was the perfect mark: a small-town cop with a willingness to go off the grid if the job demanded it. And she had daughters … it was as if she’d been made to order for them: just smart enough, just blind enough. She didn’t want to admit it, that perhaps she was in this car, arrowing through the pouring rain on a hunch, for Martha’s sake. Would justice for Brenda Cameron pay a tithe to the angels on her daughter’s behalf? She had to tell herself she was motivated only by the desire to see justice done for its own sake, but then she heard Ray Greene saying
you can’t be a maverick and a leader at the same time
. She wondered how often she’d have to push that voice away from now on.

She considered what it meant to have only her and Wingate’s faith now driving the case. She’d made enemies of all her backup: Ilunga with a severed hand and Danny Toles hung up like a dummy. She knew Willan was only a phone call away and was collecting news about dinosaurs from any and all comers. Any
of her recent moves could spell a dishonourable discharge for her: this was the ever-present thought, the awareness that the end-of-days was near.

She blamed the weather for making her thoughts extraoppressive. She had to focus on the task at hand and not think of the kinds of forces arrayed against her. The end of her career was supposed to be a source of pride for her and those she had worked with, those she had served. But she feared she was about to go out like her mother, hounded by innuendo and haunted by pride. But ex-mayor Micallef was immune to regrets. She was one hundred percent backbone. Hazel’s back was made of lesser stuff.

They drove slowly down Whitcombe in the centre of town. It was just off the main drag, a quiet side street. They pulled over a few houses away and as soon as they stopped, the noise of the rain intensified. It bounced hard against the unmarked’s window and hammered down through the newly green trees. The drops seemed to leap out of the asphalt, blown sideways by the wind. But however bad the weather was, the dusk-like light offered them the best cover they could have asked for.

There was an MX-5 Miata in the driveway at number 28. “That counts as sporty,” Hazel said.

“The car and the house aren’t a guarantee of anything, you know,” said Wingate. “If they had the presence of mind to rent two houses up here, they could have rented a third. She knew we were going to find her name out eventually.”

“Well, if I’m wrong about this, I’ve got nothing.”

He wiped the fogged windshield. The humidity in the car was making them sweat. He stared up at the house across the
street from them. It was a rickety-looking bungalow with a couple of sagging balconies. The house was dark and looked uninhabited. “So, what are we waiting for then?”

She was concentrating on the house, trying to fix it as a space in her mind. She presumed there was a door in the back as well. Probably the better one to get access to the basement. “Did you notice a van at the Bellocque house?” she asked. “Pat Barlow said he was driving a white van.”

“I didn’t see any vehicle at all.”

“And it’s not here.”

“Does that mean
he’s
not here?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think we should wait awhile. See if he shows. I want to be sure they’re both here when we make our move.”

Ninety minutes passed. She had cars out trolling for sign of the van, but the infrequent reports she was getting suggested no one could make out the breed of a dog beyond twenty metres. Time and the weather were working against them.

Wingate shifted in his seat, uncomfortable and bored. “Well, I guess if I ever
wanted
to go back to Twenty-one, that bridge is pretty much burnt.”

“Oh, it’s ashes,” she said. “I doubt there’s even a tunnel now.”

He laughed. “Do you really trust Ilunga to run those prints against the oars? What if he loses something on the way to the lab?”

“No,” she said. “This is his chance to pin everything on Goodman. If he gets a match to the oars off Eldwin’s hand, he saves face and buries his nemesis all at once. He’s a hero. How’s that inconsistent with his sleazy personality?”

“It isn’t. I just hope he doesn’t play you.”

“I’m done being played.”

They watched the street a while longer. “That was some good detectiving, by the way. I never said.”

“Good for a has-been, huh?”

“You old folk have something to teach us after all.” He gave her a warm smile.

“I like you, James. I’m glad you’ve chosen the slow lane.” “This is the slow lane, huh?”

She looked at the clock display on the dash. “Jesus,” she said. “My stomach is turning acid.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t wait anymore,” said Wingate. “If they’ve been one step ahead of us this long, maybe they’ve already dealt with this eventuality. What if they’re both gone?”

“If we bust in there and Dana Goodman isn’t there, we’ll never see him again. Give it another half-hour.”

“But what if they’re moving him, Hazel? They’re putting distance between us if that’s the case.”

She thought about it and his point was solid. “We should have patrols further af –”

“Wait,” he said. “Look at that.”

A light had gone on in a window at lawn-level. A basement light. Even in the dark of the rain, it looked like a beacon. “Okay,” she said, “okay.”

“Okay what?”

“One of us goes, the other stays and keeps an eye out for the van. We stay in contact on the walkies, low volume.”

“I’ll go,” he said.

She put a hand on his wrist. “No. She knows me. If she’s alone there, I might be able to talk her into giving up Goodman.”

“What if she’s not?”

“You’ll hear shots, no doubt. Come flying.”

He was shaking his head, nervous. “I don’t know, Hazel. I don’t like you alone in there.”

“I don’t think he’s here, James. I think she’s alone. He’s come up empty …”

“Is that necessarily a good sign?”

“I don’t know.” She checked her gun. It had a full clip in it. “I’m going to go. Keep an eye out.”

He didn’t protest, but she could tell he wasn’t happy. “Shoot first,” he said.

“Stay on channel six.”

She stepped out into the downpour and hunched her shoulders up. The wind drove the rain sideways and upwards into her face. She looked up and down the street for any sign of Goodman’s van, but the street was empty. Only she and Wingate had lacked the sense to stay indoors today. She crouch-ran across the street to the even-numbered side and sheltered under a silver maple. She could see a side-window now from her vantage, also lit, but there was no movement she could make out from within, not even shadows.

She crept along the east side, throwing looks back up the street and toward the unmarked. Wingate’s voice came in low from her belt. “Anything?”

“Another light, but I don’t see anyone inside. The street is clear. I’m going.”

Twenty-four, twenty-six … she was at the property line. There was a repetitive sound coming from the back of twenty-eight, like something being hammered, and her pulse rose. She could see the back corner of the house now, and she moved
slowly along the wall of the neighbouring house to reveal the back of twenty-eight. There was a garden back there. No van, though. The hammering sound was louder. It was an irregular clacking noise. Wingate asked what it was and she told him it sounded like a shutter being swung back and forth in the wind.