The Taken (9 page)

It was coming up to three o’clock. She walked out into the pen and looked around at the only place that was really her domain anymore. She went in to the dispatch and put her hand on PC MacTier’s shoulder. “Might be the time to get some rubber on the roads, don’t you think?”

“At least one step ahead of you. I’ve got one car here in reserve and one more in Kehoe River; the rest are waiting on the grass at various exits across this great county of ours.”

“Anything yet?”

“Not much happens at thirty kliks an hour, but something will come up, you know it will.”

“I’m putting twenty on it involving a motorcycle.” “No one will take that action, Chief.”

She went back out into the pen and sat at PC Julia Windemere’s desk. She’d taken the long weekend to visit her mother in the Kawarthas and wasn’t back until Wednesday morning. She switched on Windemere’s computer and dialled up the site. Nothing had changed. She switched it off and opened her notebook to the two numbers they’d spent all weekend calling. Bellocque’s number performed its strange ringing followed by the bleat of a busy tone. But to her surprise, Gil Paritas picked up after two rings.

“Hello?” said a surprised-sounding voice.

“Is this Gil Paritas?”

“Yes.”

“Do you check your messages much, Ms. Paritas?” “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“This is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef of the Port Dundas OPS. We left you at least six messages over the weekend which you saw fit not to return. Is there a reason you’re reluctant to talk to us?”

“Oh, god, I’m sorry – we had the cell off all weekend. It was so nice out – we never even checked.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and Dean. This is about that thing in the lake, right?” The sounds of a car radio came in clearly over the line.

“What about your experience Friday afternoon felt like it could wait three days, Ms. Paritas?”

“It’s not like that. It’s just Pat Barlow said she’d handle it.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Yeah. Did she not call?”

“She called. She came in. But I don’t think it’s up to Ms. Barlow to decide who’s obligated to talk to the police and who gets to turn their phone off and drink gin-and-tonics with hubby all weekend.”

“Dean’s not my husband.”

“Okay,”
said Hazel. “The point still stands. I find it hard to believe you thought you were free and clear.”

“It was bad judgment on our part,” Paritas said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I can hear you’re in traffic. You’re heading home?”

“I am.”

“And where’s home?”

“Toronto.”

“Is that where hubby lives?”

There was a pause on the other end. “What are you suggesting?”

“I guess I don’t know much about modern mores. Fill me in on one more thing: Do they leave crime scenes down there in Toronto?”

“Well, Detective, just a minute now. I explained what happened. I should have checked my messages, but I didn’t have any reason to think I’d left a crime scene.”

“You reeled up a body in Gannon. What’s your definition of a crime scene, Ms. Paritas?”

“I never saw a body. That was Miss Barlow’s story. I have no idea what it was.”

Hazel waited to see if she’d say anything else. “How far south are you?” she asked.

“Oh for gosh sake,” she muttered. “Are you serious? I’m on the other side of Mayfair. It’s taken me
two hours
to get here.”

“It should only take you half an hour to get to us. You know how to get to Port Dundas?”

“It
wasn’t
a body, Detective, I’m telling you.”

“I’ll expect you here by four at the latest.” She hung up without allowing Paritas another word and she smiled. She got Wingate on his walkie and told him she’d raised Paritas; he was welcome to sit in. He told her curtly he was already following orders and hung up on her. She realized she was going to have to apologize. She hated apologizing.

She’d had lunch, but the prospect of moving this case forward even an inch made her hungry again. She sent Melanie out for a club sandwich. While she waited, she watched the filmed sequence on the site a few more times, once writing
down every detail she could see in it. There wasn’t much beyond carpet, wall, waterstain, and leg. You couldn’t count a shadow as a
thing
, could you? Although discounting shadows was an elementary mistake in her line of work.

She was midway through a viewing when the screen flickered too early in the camera movement and the image failed. Then it returned, but now it was totally different: a field of blurry black and white. She dropped the pen to her desktop and turned the computer screen face on to her. Someone was pulling something away from the lens to bring it into focus. It was the front page of a newspaper. It was the
Record:
today’s. Her heart sped up and she felt paralyzed. How to record this? The newspaper dropped below the frame and ratcheting into focus behind it was the figure in the chair, the whole figure, a man, but unidentifiable because someone had tied a width of cloth around the upper half of his face. But it was a man. His mouth was moving, and he struggled in the chair, his arms secured behind it. He listened to a voice, his head tilted sideways toward it (the voice seemed to be coming from the right) and then he shook his head ferociously in the negative. Hazel leaned in toward the laptop and spoke into it – “Hello?” she said into the microphone in the lid. She wasn’t sure her voice was being transmitted, but as soon as she spoke, the form in the chair became totally still.

“Hey!” she called. “I can see you! If you can hear me, nod your head –” But the trapped figure did not nod, rather, it shook its head from side to side in terror and the image was blotted out and went black. Hazel held her breath, wondering if now the sequence would repeat with the newspaper again, but she realized, seeing the play of shadow in the image, that she
was looking at a person’s back, a person who now approached the man in the chair. “I can see you!” she shouted. “Stop what you’re doing! This is the police!”

But the figure moved slowly toward the chair and finally the masked face was visible again over its shoulder and it was shouting desperately and trying to push away. An arm flew out and struck the man on the side of the head and Hazel leapt up muttering
oh fuck
, and the man, still bound to the chair, was thrown sideways to the floor. Melanie was in the doorway.

“Skip? Did you say something?”

“Get Wingate back here. Call him in!”

“I have your sandwich.”

“Just get him!”

The figure loomed over the man tied to the chair and then Hazel saw the knife.

Cartwright was standing outside her boss’s door, as if to guard it. “What happened?” Wingate asked her.

“She only wants you.”

“Fine, then let me past.”

Cartwright opened the door, and Wingate saw Hazel behind her desk, staring intently into the laptop. She glanced at him only fleetingly and waved him over to her side of the desk. “This is unbelievable.” He saw the screen as the newspaper was being drawn away from the lens. “You better brace yourself.”

She gave him her seat and watched his face. His lips parted and then pursed. He sat completely still. “Holy god. What is he doing?”

“If you can figure it out, let me know.”

They watched it again. The figure with its back to the camera had shown a knife in a flash of light and then fallen on the stricken man in the chair. But before any motion could define what was happening, the picture warped, went black, and then the blurry newspaper appeared again.

Wingate turned slightly in the chair. “Did Spere’s people find any way to trace this?”

“Nothing,” said Hazel. “It’s just there, floating in space.”

“Man,” said Wingate under his breath. “We’re nowhere.”

“Not quite.” She moved away from the desk, exhausted from monitoring the image. “I got Gil Paritas on the phone. She was in her car driving back to Toronto. City girl, I gathered.”

“You question her?”

“Not yet. I told her to be here by four. That’s” – she consulted her watch – “ten minutes ago.”

“What are we going to do? Do you think the person who’s uploading this knows we’re watching?”

“Oh, I think so. I think someone is getting right off on this.”

He looked at her carefully. “Why though?”

“I don’t know. But we’re not really being shown anything. If this person’s in danger, you’d think, having our attention now, they’d want to prove it. This is all just … innuendo. Why bring us here and show us nothing except cheap tricks?”

His eyes flicked to the screen momentarily. “I guess if this gets updated and we see some guy twitching in a pool of blood, we’ll know for sure.”

“Or not. Keep your eye on this, okay? Do you mind?”

“No,” said Wingate. “Your interview is probably waiting for you. I’ll holler if anything changes.”

She thanked him and went back out into the hallway, told Melanie that Wingate wasn’t to be disturbed for any reason. There was a woman waiting on the other side of intake. Hazel watched her carefully. She was a strong-looking woman of about fifty-five, in an expensive, light shearling coat. She wore a faded layer of lipstick. Hazel couldn’t remember the last
time she’d worn lipstick, or even had a reason to. Paritas was obviously put out, taking deep, frustrated breaths. Hazel felt like making her wait another ten minutes. She picked up the nearest extension and dialled Wilton at the front desk and told him to bring Paritas into interview one. She waited there for the desk sergeant to bring her in.

“Ms. Paritas?” she said.

“Detective Micallef?”

“Detective Inspector. Have a seat.”

Paritas took her coat off and draped it over the chair before sitting down. She was wearing a grey silk shirt and a long beaded necklace. There was a second necklace tucked inside the shirt. She was a good-looking woman, not the type you’d expect to find on Gannon Lake holding a fishing rod. “Ms. Paritas, do you mind telling me where your boyfriend is this afternoon?”

“I told you –”

“Whatever you call him. Where is he?”

“He’s at his house … why?”

“Describe him for me.”

Paritas’s brow creased. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“He’s big. People call him bearlike. But not fat, just a big man. He has a beard and –”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yeah, that’s all I need to know.”

Paritas kept her gaze on Hazel, and then decided she wasn’t going to press her luck. She crossed one leg over the other. “Are we allowed to smoke in here?”

“Not since 1998. Let’s talk about your fishing expedition. You say you
didn’t
see a body coming out of Gannon Lake, but it was on the end of your line. So what
did
you see?”

“I really have no idea,” said Paritas. “By the time it was coming out of the water, Pat had taken over. It was too heavy for me to reel in. I just caught a flash of it. It was round and sort of orange and green. It had lines on it, I think.”

“You know, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out for bass.”

“I’m not. It’s Dean’s thing. He has about twenty stuffed fish on the wall of his house. He doesn’t even eat them. I go out with him once a year and he goes to the craft show with me. It’s a trade. It would be different if he
ate
them, but he says he’s into the ‘sport’ of it.”

“Did Dean see what was on your line?”

“Yeah. He said it was a buoy or something.”

“Don’t buoys float?”

Paritas sighed. “I’m honestly not an expect, Detective. Inspector, I mean. If you want to talk to Dean, I can give you his number.” Hazel turned her notebook to Paritas and laid her finger on the number they had for Bellocque. “That’s it,” said Paritas.

“It’s out of order.”

“Oh. I’ll mention it to him.”

Hazel smiled at Paritas with a tilted head. “Handy, huh, the two of you go out fishing, find something that might have been a body on the lakebed, and then you’re unreachable for the rest of the weekend.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Does Dean have internet access at his house?”

Gil Paritas laughed. “That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know Dean, obviously.”

“No … no, I don’t,” said Hazel. “Tell me about him.”

“He can fix anything with his hands, any mechanical little thing. He’s got projects all over the house. It’s how he makes a living. Fixes people’s washing machines, wires houses, digs septic tanks. It’s how we met.”

“He dug your septic tank?”

“It was more romantic than it sounds.”

“It would have to be.” She poised her pen over the PNB. “What’s the address?”

“Of what?”

“The house where Mr. Bellocque dug your septic tank?”

“Oh,” said Paritas, waving her hands in front of her. “That place is long gone. It was just outside of Gilmore. But I sold it after my divorce.”

“You’re divorced, are you? When was that?”

“What’s my divorce got to do with anything?”

Hazel thought about that. “Nothing, I guess. So you stay with Dean now if you come up to Gilmore.”

“That’s right.”

“Fine, then. You were saying he’s good with tools.”

“Well, he’s good with
real
things. But computers? The internet? Forget it. He thinks it’s modern witchcraft.”

“So your boyfriend wouldn’t have a webcam or anything like –”

“Honestly, I told you, he’s not my boyfriend. I’m
fifty-four
, for god’s sake. I don’t have a
boyfriend
. He’s just a … a
friend
. He lends me a hand once in a while.”

“I’m sure he does. So what is he then? What is the
nature
of your relationship?”

Paritas looked down at the tabletop, wiped away some invisible smudge with her finger. “Can I ask what my relationship with Dean has to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” said Hazel, brightly. “Let’s move on. Why were you fishing where you were fishing?”

“There was nothing biting. Pat said she knew a better spot.”

“So it was Pat’s idea to fish there.”

“She’s the one who knows the lake.”