The Taken Read online

  They looked back and forth between them, but no one was taking credit.

  “What? I have a secret admirer?”

  “Well, I just followed the bright paper,” admitted Windemere. “I actually, uh, didn’t contribute.” She turned to her colleagues. “Yet!”

  Hazel put her hands on top of the box. “So… this is from all of you?” No one said anything. She picked up the gift. “What’s going on?” she said, but then all at once she dropped the box on the table and stood, alarmed.

  “What?” said Wingate, stepping forward into the room.

  “That doesn’t smell right,” she said. “There’s something in there, that isn’t a… isn’t a -”

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s everyone get out of this room -” but he didn’t finish what he was saying, because the box was moving. There was a sound from within it, like a mechanical whine, and then something was tearing frantically at the end of the box, moving it in short jabs toward the end of the table until it upended and went crashing to the floor.

  “Jesus,” said Hazel, instinctively stepping away, but as she did something blew out of the top of the half-opened box, a red, screeching blur like a child’s firecracker, and she dove for the ground, batting at the air over her head. There was general disorder in the room, strange half-uttered cries, and a crush for the door, but then Forbes called out, “Hold on! Hold on -”

  “Fuck!” yelled Hazel, now standing again. She stared at what Forbes was staring at. “What the fuck?”

  It was a mouse. It was standing in the corner, its eyes shuttling back and forth between the two sides of the room. She supposed it was a regular white mouse, but this one was red, or at least it had been painted red, although she could see a darker line of what had to be blood dripping from its mouth.

  “Why is that thing red?” said Hazel. “What the hell is going on here?” Forbes and Wingate stepped deeper into the room, walking carefully to the side of her desk where the game had fallen. Wingate toed the lids apart and then recoiled.

  “Good god,” he said.

  12

  Down in Mayfair, on Jack Deacon’s mortuary table, it looked unreal, a movie prop. But it was real, and as Deacon turned it over with his living hand and Howard Spere took notes with a pen held in his gloved hands, the whole scene took on an even more surreal aspect.

  Deacon was talking into a tape recorder as Spere wrote. “Left hand of a caucasian male, age between forty and fifty, no distinguishing characteristics -”

  “Apart from its being separated from its owner,” said Spere.

  “Apart from that. The cut has been made under the carpals, a rough cut to judge by its raggedness and the bits of shattered bone we find here. I can only hope the victim was knocked out or dead when it was done.”

  “I don’t think he was,” said Hazel quietly. She was standing away from the brightly lit table, not wanting to look too closely on the thing that had been sent to her wrapped in colourful paper. She was sweating in the cold room. Wingate stood beside her, leaning forward to get a better look. “We have the attack on film.”

  “We don’t actually have the attack,” said Wingate. “Just the moments leading up to it. There’s no proof that this hand and that… that person in the chair…”

  “Is there a way to tell if the victim was alive when his hand was… removed?” asked Hazel.

  “It’s not really possible to say with any certainty,” said Deacon. “Not with this body part, at least. I’d want to see more necrotized blood to be certain it was a post-mortem amputation. This thing is very pale indeed, so there’s been blood loss, and that’s consistent with an extremity disambiguated while blood was still circulating.” He held the hand palm up and studied it for a moment. “The wrist tendons have retreated into the cut a little – that windowshade effect you see when living tendon has been cut… and I guess that tends to argue for the hand being cut from a living body. But you’d still see some of this pre-rigor spring-back immediately post-mortem. So what we have in front of us doesn’t rule out that the victim was alive at the moment of amputation. Or that he was dead, mind you.”

  “Jesus,” said Hazel. “Do you want us to throw up?”

  “Look,” said Spere, “what about the puncture wounds, where the note was pinned? Is there any bruising?”

  Deacon looked again at the top of the hand. A note written on a square white piece of paper had been attached there with a fishhook. A “nice touch” was how Spere had put it when he saw it. Deacon pulled the skin tight with latex-gloved thumb and forefinger and shone a pinlight onto it. “Good instinct, Howard. Hazel?”

  She stepped forward reluctantly. “Do I really need to see this?”

  “Slight purpling at the wound sites,” he said. “Dead bodies don’t bruise.”

  Spere held his palms up to the heavens. “Ah, an answer.”

  “That only means he was alive when the note was pinned to him,” said Wingate.

  “That’s correct.”

  “So this fuck pinned the note to the victim’s hand and then sawed it off?” said Hazel.

  “That strikes you as particularly barbaric?” said Spere, wiggling a finger around in his auditory canal.

  Wingate was holding the note, in its zip-lock bag, up to the light. “‘Just wanted to give you a hand with your investigation,’” he read.

  Spere shook his head. “And he’s funny.”

  Hazel had retreated again and was leaning against one of the autopsy tables on the other side of the room. If she had to look at that severed hand again, she really was going to be sick. “This brings things to another level,” she said. “We have to think through our options.”

  “What if this person just wants us to watch?” said Wingate. “What if this is a demonstration of some kind?”

  “Of what kind?”

  “Of power.”

  “And for what purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She pushed off the table. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to visit the Record and see what they can tell us about Eldwin. Why is he writing about this stuff? The body in the lake, the fishhook, the note…” She fell silent a moment. “I’ll tell you one thing: he’s not getting any more ink, not until we understand what this is all about. We’ll flush him out: if he wants to keep telling this macabre story, he’s going to have to show his face.”

  Wingate was looking right through her. He was lost in his thoughts. After a moment, he approached her and spoke quietly. “What if he can’t?”

  “Will we know the difference between can’t and won’t?” Wingate didn’t have a response. “Fingerprint that thing and put it on ice,” Hazel said to Spere. He nodded to her, holding a finger up. His cell had buzzed.

  “Just a second.” He held the phone to his chest. “I’ve got Allen Barry on the phone. He’s my imaging guy in Toronto. He wants to know if we can receive a file down here.”

  “You mean couriered?” said Deacon.

  “No, a singing telegram, Jack. He means over the net.”

  “We can go up to my office.”

  Spere put the phone to his ear. “I’ll call you back in five.”

  Jack Deacon wrapped the hand and put it back on dry ice, in a red cooler like the kind you’d use to store beer for a picnic. It was going to put Hazel off her beer for months.

  She realized she’d never been in Jack Deacon’s personal office. She only ever saw him under those harsh blue lights in the basement, surrounded by the stench of preserving fluids and human flesh arrested in its decay by science. He took off his white coat, under which he wore a proper suit, also the first time she’d seen him look like anything other than a nice ghoul with a scalpel. He looked presentable.

  “You can put him on speakerphone,” he said to Spere, pulling out his black leather chair so Spere could sit.

  Barry’s voice came through the tinny speaker. “Who am I talking to?”

  “Me, DC Wingate, DI Micallef, and Dr. Frankenste
in.”

  “Hi Jack,” said Barry. Deacon waved at the phone. “Okay, so listen. Those little black photos aren’t what you think they are. They are pictures, but not twelve individual pictures, like you thought. They’re one image.”

  “One big black image?” said Hazel. “Is that more helpful?”

  “I scanned them and got them into Photoshop. Once they were all laid out on one template, I moved them around fitting edges together. There’s enough texture in the images to see where one edge goes against another. Jack, what’s your email there?” Deacon gave it to him. “Okay, I’m sending the first image through.”

  They waited, listening to Barry tapping his keyboard in Toronto.

  “Don’t expect too much from this one. But you need to see the ‘before’ picture if you know what I mean.” They checked Deacon’s email and there was nothing. “That’s fine, I’ll keep talking. I brightened the image I had and then worked the contrast. Then brightened it again, recontrasted it, and so on; I had to do this four times. There’s information there.”

  “And what is it?” asked Wingate.

  “Hold on, it’s through,” said Deacon, and he clicked on the tiff file Barry had sent. It loaded: it looked like a picture of an oil spill, shot through with faint lines, like reflections off its surface.

  “Okay, I’m sending the reworked image through. It’s not going to look like a real picture, but you have to believe me, this is what was in that black mess.”

  They waited as Deacon repeatedly clicked his “receive” button. They could hear Barry breathing over the line.

  “You got it?”

  “Just tell us what it is, Allen,” said Hazel impatiently. “Naw, you should see it.”

  The email arrived. Deacon clicked it open, and over the pitch, swirling black image appeared something like a ghost emerging from dark smoke.

  “What is it?” said Spere.

  “I think it’s a dead animal of some kind,” said Barry over the speakerphone.

  Deacon put on his glasses and leaned forward on the palms of his hands to look closely at the image. It looked like a pile of fur, but there was no face, no limbs. “Is it a pelt?”

  “Maybe,” said Barry.

  They all studied it. It seemed to have a shape; something about it seemed to infold on itself.

  “Hold on,” said Hazel, putting her finger against Deacon’s screen. “Is that the end of a sleeve?”

  With her eye, she traced up from the crushed edge of what had appeared to her to be the armhole. She moved her finger up. “This is a hem. Look…”

  She waited for the others to see it. “So it is,” said Deacon. “It’s a black sweater.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Spere. “All this trouble for a fucking sweater?”

  “Well, glad to be of service,” came Barry’s voice. “Now you folks get to figure out what it means.”

  13

  Wednesday, May 25

  She’d successfully avoided visiting the offices of the Westmuir Record for almost twenty years. The last time she’d been through those doors had been to check the proof of her father’s obituary in person. She hadn’t wanted such a thing faxed, and her mother was so sick with grief she couldn’t do the job herself. Back then, at the end of the eighties, the editor had been an inoffensive old man named Harvey Checker. His Record had been the classic country newspaper, with jam recipes and pictures of kids dressed up in period costumes for the Sunny Days Parade. None of this “real” reporting that Sunderland liked to dream up. When Sunderland had taken over in 1997, he’d changed the paper’s motto from “Eggs, Coffee, and The Record: a Perfect Westmuir Morning” to “On The Record for All of Westmuir.”

  The paper was housed in an old tool and die factory at the top of Main Street; it was one of the first businesses you saw after crossing the bridge over the Kilmartin River. Hazel and Wingate went in and asked for Sunderland, but after a five-minute wait, a young woman with short black hair came out and offered her hand. “I’m Becca Portman,” she said. “Mr. Sunderland isn’t available.” She looked back and forth between the two officers, smiling mildly.

  “Did he see me standing in his lobby?” asked Hazel.

  “Actually, no. He’s in Atlanta this week for a conference.” Hazel mentally added Sunderland to her list of the unaccounted-for. After all, it was in his newspaper that the short story was appearing. And he was no fan of hers. Although it was hard to credit how what was happening had anything to do with her. Portman leaned toward her and said, with a hint of embarrassment, “‘Reupping Small Market Ads: Supersize Your Customers, Supersize Your Revenues.’ It’s sorta gay, I know, but this is a business.”

  “And what are you?”

  “I’m the managing editor. And for three issues, I’m the interim publisher, which is, honestly, so…”

  “Awesome,” said Hazel.

  “Yeah.”

  Wingate took her hand and shook it. “It’s good to meet you. Do you have an office?”

  She did; it was Sunderland ’s office. She led them to it and closed the door. There were pictures of Sunderland on the walls with celebrities who wouldn’t be recognized twenty kilometres south of Port Dundas. Wingate put a picture of the severed hand on her desk. Portman covered her mouth with her hand. “Wow,” she said. “That’s kinda gross, isn’t it?”

  “Does Gord Sunderland know it’s my birthday tomorrow?”

  Becca Portman narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so. But happy birthday?”

  “Someone sent that to me in a wrapped box.” She took her notebook out of her hip pocket and removed a Polaroid picture. She held it out to Portman. “And this was found in Gannon Lake on Friday. You’re running a story that features a body in a lake.” Portman was looking at the picture. “Can you get your boss on the phone?”

  “I’m sorry, but what does that nasty hand have to do with this mannequin? Or the story?”

  “There are aspects of our investigation we can’t discuss right now, Miss Portman,” said Wingate. “But you can trust me: it’s connected.”

  “So,” said Hazel, “your boss?”

  “All I have is a hotel number, I’m afraid.” She handed back the picture. “Mr. Sunderland told me to hold down the ship.”

  “The ship?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Miss Portman,” said Wingate, “can you show us the next chapter of the story you’re running?”

  “No,” she said, blithely. “I can’t.”

  “We’re not rabid fans,” said Hazel, “who can’t wait until tomorrow morning. We’re police officers.”

  “The problem is, we don’t have it yet,” said Portman.

  “Don’t you have to go to press?” asked Wingate.

  “Tonight.” She looked at her watch, as if the evening could creep up on her without her noticing. “Mr. Eldwin’s giving us the chapters one at a time now.”

  “So when are you expecting him?”

  “Expecting him?”

  “You have a poor grip of English for a woman who works at a newspaper,” said Hazel. “Expecting, anticipating, looking forward to his presence.”

  She looked at Hazel queerly. “I’m not expecting him,” she said. “He sends the chapters in by email.”

  “Fucking technology is going to be the death of policework, I tell you.”

  Wingate brought her attention around to him again. “From where, Miss Portman? Where is he emailing from?”

  “Um? His computer?”

  Wingate looked at Hazel. Hazel said, “Can we see the last email he sent?”

  Now she was happy to help. “Sure,” she said, and she leaned over Sunderland ’s desk and brought up her email, turning the screen to them. Hazel went behind the desk, gently pushing Portman out of the way, and sat in Sunderland ’s chair, turning the screen back to herself. There were dozens of emails still in the inbox. Two were from Colin Eldwin, and she opened the one that was from this past Saturday afternoon. It said, simply,
“Hi Becca, I’ve had a couple of new ideas for the story, so toss what I sent on Thursday, okay? Here’s chapter three for Monday – I’ll get this Thursday’s to you asap. Thanks! CE.”

  She opened the first email. It was dated Thursday, May 12. “First two chapters,” it read. “More in a week. CE.” Both emails were sent from Eldwin’s email address, [email protected].

  “Where are the original third and fourth chapters Eldwin sent?”

  “I trashed them. Always respect the writer’s wishes.” Hazel thought, Editorial Relationships, second year.

  “Did you read them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And why do you think he wanted to rewrite them?”

  Portman shrugged, an all-encompassing shrug of total incompetence. “I guess he wasn’t happy.”

  “What were they about? What happened in them?”

  “Oh gosh,” she said, searching the ceiling. “Let’s see, they drag that poor girl into the boat and Gus throws up some more, and then they take it to the police and it turns out it’s some girl that’s been missing for months and the police, like, they hold Dale and Gus, but they’re innocent and they let them go. But Dale has a bad feeling.”

  “A bad feeling. What kind of bad feeling?”

  “I think that’s where the fourth chapter ended. I can understand why Mr. Eldwin wanted to revise. It was a little too on-the-nose for a mystery story. I like what he’s doing with it now.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s goosebump stuff, don’t you think?”

  Hazel stared at the girl for a moment, lost for anything to say, and then she returned her attention to the computer screen and scrolled down the inbox. There were emails from Sunderland, from other columnists and writers, from advertisers. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. She went back to the Eldwin emails. “I want copies of these,” she said. “You have a computer person here?”