The Taken (5 page)

“Motherfucker was weighted to the lakebed,” came Calberson’s voice from the back of the boat. “I had to swim along the bottom and cut it loose.” He was treading water behind them. “Someone want to give me a hand?”

Tate leapt to the rear of the boat, shouting “10-22! 10-22!” into his walkie, the code for
disregard
. Jellinek handed Wingate a short grappling hook, and he latched the netting with the end of it and pulled it in. What he drew over the side of the boat weighed no more than fifty pounds. But how could it?
Calberson was tumbling back over the rear, and Tate was slapping him repeatedly on his upper arm as if to assure himself his partner was really alive. “You okay, Calberson? You okay?”

The man had his forearms up to deflect the blows. “Jesus, Vic, I’m fine, stop pounding me.”

“Holy frig, I thought you were dead, I thought you were a fucking dead man.”

“I’m not! Okay? Now what is that thing?”

Wingate was kneeling over it, disentangling the end of the grappling hook from the netting. The three other men gathered behind.

It was a mannequin.

They took over one of the cells in the holding-pen hall, cells that were almost always empty, and this sometimes struck Hazel as a pity because they were nice cells, as far as cells went, with barred windows looking across Porter Street to the little picnic park, and they had passably comfortable chairs and cots. Only one of the cells had a sink and a toilet, as even the most pessimistic predictions of the men who had built this station house in 1923 did not foresee a time when more than one man too dangerous to be permitted access to the public washrooms would ever be kept in these cells at the same time. And indeed, they had been right. The cots had been added in the fifties, when the most common inmate was a drunk needing an airing out before being sent home to his wife. The predictable roster of overindulgers were still the most frequent guests in these cells. That is, when it wasn’t the officers themselves, catching fifteen minutes in the midst of a quiet shift.

For their purposes, they dragged an unused desk into the cell and covered it with a tarp. The mannequin was in a body
bag, and had attracted its share of attention as it was brought from Tate and Calberson’s van into the station house. “It’s not what you think,” Hazel had said repeatedly, until everyone went back to their work. She hobbled into the cell on her cane. “Do you think we need Spere?”

“Do you?” asked Wingate.

“No,” she said, lowering herself carefully onto one of the cots. “Go get Cassie’s camera and you can take some snaps of this thing. And give her this.” She handed him her notebook. “Tell her to call the numbers Jellinek gave us for Bellocque and Paritas and get those two in. I want to know how a pair of Sunday fishermen managed to hook a mannequin weighted to the lakebed.”

“Maybe they used flies,” said Wingate. “Should I get Pat Barlow back in?”

“I want to see how their story jibes with hers before we talk to her again. Go on, get started.”

Wingate left as Calberson and Tate put the bag on the desk and unzipped it. The opened bag emitted a stench of rotting vegetation and when they tipped the putty-coloured form out, runnels of grey lakewater ran over the side of the table and onto the floor. It was a female model, tinged in places with light blooms of new algae. It was headless and without hands or feet, her sex vaguely hinted at in the rise of two small, nipple-less breasts, and a smooth pubis. Hazel could imagine the staring, painted blue eyes, the blush on the cheeks, the dark black eyelashes. After they’d freed the mannequin from the bag, Calberson fished out the five two-pound weights that had held the hollow form to the lake bottom. “Someone wanted to make sure this thing stayed down there,” he said.

“Or that it was easy to find,” said Hazel. Wingate returned with PC Jenner’s digital camera. “Get some close-ups of the extremities,” she said. “What there is of them.”

Wingate started shooting. Whoever had put this thing into the lake had gone to the trouble of sawing off the missing parts rather than detaching them at the joints that were designed for easy mixing and matching. In fact, all five joints were still intact: the cuts had been made below them. There was a sixth joint at the waist, to pose the figure in some fetching position. That was why Barlow had seen the rear end rising out of the water. Tate and Calberson stood against the wall, watching Wingate make his pictures. He flipped it over onto its belly and photographed the smooth, featureless back.

“What’s that?” asked Hazel. There was something printed right over the spot where her own back had broken down.

Wingate leaned in. “The manufacturer’s name. Verity Forms, it says. And a serial number.”

“Well, it’s something.”

“I’ll look them up after I’m done making pictures,” said Wingate.

“You going to ask them if they’re missing a mannequin?” Tate asked. “This is just someone’s idea of a prank. It’s a waste of time, and what’s more, it almost cost my partner his life.”

“The boat drifted,” said Calberson. “Calm down already.”

“This is bullshit,” said Tate, and he went out of the cell, slamming the door.

“It’s stressful,” said Calberson. “Diving. Do you need us anymore?”

“No,” said Hazel. “Thanks for everything.” When the door
was shut behind them, she said, “Now we’re down to one dummy.”

“I hope you’re not talking about me,” said Wingate.

Hazel raised a sarcastic eyebrow at him.

“You didn’t think they needed to know about the story in the newspaper?”

“They’re scuba-heads, James. They don’t do well on land. What I want to do is talk to the couple on Barlow’s boat and see what they were really up to.”

“What about this Colin Eldwin?”

“Who?”

“The writer standing in the parking lot?”

“Right. Him,” said Hazel. “Fine. Get all of them in. If it’s a publicity stunt, it cost the county at least three grand; get each of them for dumping, maybe we’ll get half of it back.” She levered herself up to standing with difficulty. “But if you can get anyone in today, you’re going to have to do the interviews yourself. I’m in no shape to do anything but drink a Scotch and go to bed.”

“I’ll start on the manufacturer.”

“Your first dead end. Good luck.”

Wingate had PC Forbes take her home and then, after his lunch, he tried to raise all three people Hazel wanted him to call, with no luck. Bellocque’s number seemed disconnected, Paritas’s went to voicemail, and when he called the Eldwin number, his wife answered and told him her husband was in Toronto for the long weekend. It was a bad weekend to try to raise anyone, and with the weather the way it was (bright and warm) the likelihood of someone actually being near their
phone was pretty low. Just in case any of them were known quantities, he ran the names through the Canadian Police Information Centre database, but CPIC came up empty on all three of them.

After striking out on the phone, he spent some more time alone in the cell with the plastic corpse. Its silent, ruined form was eerie; it made his stomach flip to look at it. With the head and extremities missing, it had no identifying characteristics but the tiny letters on its lower back. He wrote the name and serial number down and went out to his desk.

He wasn’t sure what the manufacturer would be able to tell him about a drowned mannequin, but maybe with some luck he’d be able to find out where a person might buy a Verity product. Was it local enough to suggest someone near Caplin had done this on purpose? Or was this just a dumb boondoggle: a discarded mannequin tangled in fishing net?

He looked up Verity Forms on the web but found nothing. He tried “Verity Mannequins,” and came up empty again. A wholesale mannequin site had an ordering number in Fresno, so he called it and the lady on the other end told him, as far as she knew, there was no “Verity Forms” manufacturing mannequins. She gave him the name of a Canadian wholesaler who told him the same thing. Wingate put down the phone and squinted at his handwritten notes. Maybe he’d transcribed the name incorrectly? Maybe it had said
Vanity
forms?

He went back into the holding pen and looked closely at the name. He’d not made a mistake. Maybe the serial number was actually a phone number … but it looked strange for a phone number: 419-20-028-04. He checked online and found that the 419 area code was for the northwest part of Ohio. Toledo,
specifically. He dialled 419-200-2804, and a woman answered, saying “Yeah?”

“Hello?” said Wingate.

“Um,
Hi
.”

“Is this Verity Forms?”

“No, it’s Cynthia Kronrod. You’re looking for Verity?”

“I … yes, I am.”

“Do you know if she’s on this floor?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Wingate.

“If you think I’m knocking on every door in the res, you’re wrong, pal. Maybe you have the wrong floor.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Hold on,” the girl said, and he heard her cup the receiver. Her muffled voice reverberated through her hand. “
HELLO
?
IS THERE ANYONE NAMED VERITY ON FOUR
?” There was a long pause, and then the girl came back. “People
live
for phone calls here, so if no one answered, I think there’s no one by that name here. Sorry.”

“Okay,” he said, “thanks.”

“Are you in Carter Hall, too?”

“Um, no.”

“Too bad.”

“Okay, thank you,” he said, but she wasn’t ready to let him go.

“If your feet point you Carter-way, I’m in the west tower. Fourth floor. I have to buzz you in, but it’s no problem. You have a nice voice, you know.”

“Well, thank you –”

“Cynthia Kronrod,” she said, and she spelled her last name. “If you can get here for seven tonight, we’re having a hall party.
Two bottles of Everclear, six gallons of orange Gatorade, and one garbage can, and you know what that means, right? We’re getting perfectly hooped. Come if you can, okay? What’s your name, by the way?”

“Um, Jimmy.”

“Awesome,” she said, and he hung up before she could get another word in.

“Good grief,” he muttered.

He walked over to Cassie Jenner’s desk. “I don’t suppose you feel like going to a totally rad party at Carter Hall tonight, do you?”

She looked at him strangely. “I’ve got plans.”

“Too bad,” he said. He put the paper with his notes down in front of her. “What do you make of this, then?”

She studied his scrawl. He noticed her checking out his clean fingernails and wondered if she could tell he wore a light gloss to protect them. “You dialled it?”

“I did.”

“I see,” she said. “I gather it was a dead end. Maybe it’s a serial number? A thing like that would need a serial number anyway, wouldn’t it?”

“I was thinking that, but the serial number’s for the model, isn’t it? It’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said.

“It’s all you got, Detective. Run with it.”

He bent over her and typed the number into Google, but the search brought up nothing. He stood staring at Jenner’s screen. Then he turned and went back into the evidence room and leaned down close to the letters on the mannequin’s back. This close up, it stank of sulphurous rot, but his instinct had been right: close up, the letters of the name and the numbers
weren’t straight and they showed a faint crackling around the edges. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached into his pocket and removed his penknife. Jenner was standing in the doorway.

“You want to borrow my microscope?” she said.

He pried open the knife and used the very tip of it along the top edge of the capital “F” in
Forms
. It peeled away cleanly and he lifted it off the plastic and held it out on the point of the blade to her. “Look at that,” he said.

She took the knife. “It’s an ‘F.’”

“It’s Letraset,” he said. “Someone rubbed these letters onto the mannequin. The numbers too. They’ve been put here.”

“
Get
out,” she said.

“Someone’s playing a game.” He went past her in the doorway, returning to her desk. He sat and looked at the numbers again. Then he remembered the GPS coordinates Constable Tate had made him write down. “How do we find out a location from its latitude and longitude?” he asked her.

Jenner had pulled up a second chair from the desk beside hers. “There have to be convertors online.” She reached over him and tapped another search into Google. It brought them to a page that mapped coordinates.

“The numbers Tate gave me were six figures each.”

“Just try some combinations,” she suggested.

He typed in 41.920 and -02.804 and they found themselves somewhere in the north of Spain. 4.19200 and 2.804 got them into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. 41 92.0 and 02 8.04 moved them above the border between Spain and France. He entered 4 19.200 and -28 0.4 and plunged back into the ocean near Accra. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said, sitting
back heavily. “But someone put those numbers and that name there deliberately.”

“It was a good idea,” she said.

Then he had a flash. “Wait a second. Webpages have names so we can remember them, right? But don’t they all have numerical addresses too?”

“Try it,” she said. He typed HTTP:// 419.20.028.04 into her browser and after a couple of seconds, something began to happen. A page was loading.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on …”

There was a box in the middle of the screen, like an abstract painting. The browser rendered it slowly, finally revealing a dirty whitish image. They stared at it, disappointed again, but then the image began to drift. “Whoa,” said Jenner. “It’s a webcam, I think.”

She was right. They were looking at a moving image. A camera was scanning slowly to the right, tracking along a wall, a painted concrete wall, it seemed, stained by water. There was a shag carpet and some litter scattered around the bottom of the wall. It was a basement. The camera moved slowly, in total silence, picking up faint pools of light and leaving them behind. There was nothing of interest in the room, and the pan took a full minute to reach its farthest righthand extremity and then the image flickered, went black, and renewed itself where it started: an image of the empty room and the camera beginning its pan to the right again. They watched the entire sequence a second time.