The Taken Read online

  There was nothing of interest in the drawers, nor in the bathroom. On one of the bedside tables, he found a pile of paper with one of the drafts of Eldwin’s story on it. It was written over with small cuts and corrections. Eldwin had crossed out the word gaspingly and replaced it with mind-manglingly. Wingate looked more closely at the sentence. He thought the word Eldwin had probably wanted was horrorstruck. He made sure the papers looked the way he’d found them.

  He retreated to the hallway. A guestroom with a convertible couch was across from the bedroom. Some books lay piled on the couch, leaning against one of the arms. The room next to it appeared to be Eldwin’s office, and Wingate spent a little more time in it, shuffling through papers on the desk. These appeared to be pages from the Great Canadian Novel. From what he could tell at a quick glance, Eldwin had been working on a section that took place in a mining town in northern Ontario. It looked as if Eldwin did most of his composing on his desktop computer, a bulky PC model at least six years old. Listening for Mrs. Eldwin, he leaned down under the desk and turned the computer on from the hard drive. It bonged softly and took two minutes to boot up, and then Wingate quickly searched the root directory for text files. He found the first four chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” but there was no evidence of the replacement chapters he’d told Portman he was going to send. He stared at the screen and then tried to open Outlook to go through Eldwin’s email, but the program was password-protected. Wingate blinked at the empty box and then typed in Verity and Verityforms, knowing he was just shooting in the dark, and neither worked. He couldn’t remember the DNS number from the back of the mannequin, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked either. He shut the computer down and then stood in the office a moment or two longer, looking at the shelves. The books here were mostly hardcovers, recent fiction in English, as well as some of the classics in old paperbacks. Tolstoy and Joyce. Chesterton, Gogol, and Graham Greene. On a higher shelf, Trollope and Flaubert and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. He realized these books were in the original French. He breathed in deeply and sighed an arrow of air out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure what any of this meant, apart from the fact that this guy was obviously hoping to punch above his weight.

  Back in the hallway, he saw a closed door and, checking behind himself to be sure Mrs. Eldwin was keeping busy with her bottle, he went to open it. Behind it were stairs leading to the basement. He unsnapped the strap on his holster and switched on the light.

  As he descended, he could see the basement wasn’t anything like the one in the video. It was upholstered and furnished: almost a separate apartment. There was an expensive-looking bar with four stools behind it and it was fully stocked with good whiskies and other liquors. A couch faced a fireplace and there was an end table stocked with interior design magazines. At the far end of the room stood a stationary bike and a rowing machine. He walked over to the bar and stood beside it. It was difficult to imagine the Eldwins as big entertainers, and he concluded that all of this, all this good living, was for them alone. There was a pair of birthday cards standing on the bar. He picked one of them up. It was one of those cards with an earnest, rhyming message on the inside on the subject of the inverse relationship between the recipient’s age and her beauty. The handwritten note said, You’re a flower that blooms more beautifully every year. I’m grateful for everything you’ve given me, my love, even if I’m the toadstool in your garden. Lots of love, Colin. Wingate stared at the card. Every relationship was a mystery.

  He returned upstairs and put his cap back on. “Find what you were looking for?” she asked him.

  “I wasn’t looking for anything,” he said. “Just seeing if anything jumped out at me.”

  She swayed a little. He imagined she’d been able to get a couple more stiff drinks into her while he’d been snooping. “Did anything jump out at you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then you can have that drink.”

  He sat down at the table and let her pour him one. She put it down in front of him, but he didn’t touch it. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “Before wasn’t personal?”

  “I was just wondering how the two of you afford all of this. I mean, Colin isn’t a successful writer -”

  “Yet,” she said.

  “Right, yet. And you take in dogs. Does that pay well?”

  “It pays okay. But not enough for all this,” she said, sweeping her arm out. “That’s what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  “My parents died in a car accident six years ago and I got everything, including a large settlement. It was our chance to start over. I put everything into this house I thought he’d like to have. But I guess it’s not enough.”

  “I’m sorry. About your parents.”

  “You lose everyone eventually, or they lose you. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

  He stood out on the sidewalk, looking back at the house. From the front, a nondescript, one-storey bungalow on a country sidestreet. There was no hint that a crazy, heartbroken woman lived behind that door, nor a man who could inspire the kinds of passionate feelings he’d seemed to inspire in his wife and, by her report, others. The world of the case had fully opened up now; so many parts of it were in motion. In his mind, he saw the elements moving over each other, emerging out of the fog of hints, beginning to jockey for position in the play of cause and effect, relationships and connections…

  Suddenly, he realized why the view of the back garden had rattled him. In the most recent chapter of the Bass Lake story, the father had brought the body to a house with a flagstone path and a fountain. And – he turned and looked behind himself – a willow tree. There was one across the street, a huge, healthy willow with a wide trunk, its long green leaves cascading over the lawn it stood on. It was as if Eldwin had rearranged the elements of his own house for his story. There was nothing strange about that – writers had to draw on something. What was strange was that he’d had a fictional character bringing a dead body here, to his house.

  He looked back toward the bungalow. He was imagining Mrs. Eldwin ranging madly through that huge backyard, waving a half-empty bottle of Grand Marnier at the heavens. They needed something else to fall into place now, something that would bridge the unknowns. He reached into his pocket with a gloved hand and removed the computer mouse he’d stolen from Eldwin’s office. He felt he already knew what Fraser would tell him when he ran the prints. He got back into his cruiser and pointed it east.

  15

  Thursday, May 26

  Her alarm went off at 5 a.m. Someone had reprogrammed the LED clock beside the bed to flash HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLD GIRL. She was sixty-two.

  She brushed and washed up and in the time between getting out of bed and coming out of the bathroom, a glint of red dawn had appeared in the corner of the window. For the rest of Wednesday, she’d waited by her phone in her office like some disappointed prom queen, but no one of interest had called. She’d spent part of the afternoon obsessing over how much blood, exactly, it would take to paint the message they’d seen. Surely, it was too much blood? For the rest of the day, the site had shown the vile sequence over and over. By the time the night shift came in, Bail and Renald and Wilton had figured that the quantity of blood required to make such an image was at least two pints. That was a fifth of a normal person’s blood. They were killing him. And she was waiting for news that wasn’t coming. She felt that she was being played for a fool and for the first time on this case, it began to feel personal.

  She’d taken her cruiser home and planned to make a drive-through breakfast at the Timmie’s on 41, a birthday breakfast, perhaps, a double-double and an actual donut. Yes, a Boston Cream for her birthday, even if it was going to be 6 a.m.

  You catch more flies with honey. She’d sugar herself up and go to meet Chip Willan and be super-sweet. That never worked with Ian Mason, but Mason had been spiritually diabetic: niceness never worked with the man. Maybe the new comman
der could be charmed.

  Just the same, a pill to pave the way, she thought. She dressed – full uniform – and opened the sidetable drawer, but she realized she’d left them in a jacket pocket. Or she thought she had: they weren’t in the jacket either. Strange. She got down on all fours (not so bad, she thought, an impossible pose even a week earlier) and searched under the bed, but it was dark, and even with all the lights on, she couldn’t see into the middle of the space. She checked the other side. Nothing. Well, there was still the loose stash of Percs and Ativans and sleeping pills piled in a little pyramid inside the bathroom medicine cabinet. But when she opened the mirror, instead of the jumble of welcoming blue and white and yellow pills, there was a little bottle of extra-strength Tylenol and a note taped to it. “Fuck,” she said, snatching it down.

  The note, in her mother’s hand, said, “Happy birthday old girl. It’s a brand new day. See you at dinner.”

  She gripped the red-and-white Tylenol bottle in her hands, squeezing it to keep from shouting, and then she threw it against the wall behind her. She pulled a muscle in her middle back doing it, and found herself on one knee on the bathroom floor. “Goddamnit, Mother.” The top of the bottle had burst off and a spray of white, useless pills was rolling around on the cold tiles. “Goddamnit.” She reached forward carefully, grabbed a small handful of them, and stood. The space between her shoulderblades was cramping and uncramping. She popped three of the pills and washed them down with a handful of water. Just for that, she was going to have a greasy breakfast sandwich, too.

  The sun was fully up as she pulled onto Highway 41 and headed south. She had to drive with her arms locked out straight in front of her to keep her back pressed against the seat. She was seething. What right did anyone have to take away her comforts? By acting on her own, her mother had ruined Hazel’s plans to wean herself off, and she was ready to wean herself off, she’d even thought she’d begin on her birthday. But Emily had taken the choice out of her hands. She’d be getting a mouthful at dinner, that was for sure.

  She pulled into the Timmie’s below Kehoe Glenn, but she no longer had a taste for anything solid, all she wanted was a coffee. She’d have to manufacture her own sweetness with Willan. She was out of practice talking to others, she knew this, she didn’t even need yesterday’s experience at the Record as proof. Or her shortness with Wingate afterwards.

  She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d behaved the way she did. Threatening that girl. Partly because she was on Gord Sunderland’s turf and that naturally made her lip curl, and of course there was the building stress associated with the case. But if she was being honest with herself, it was Becca Portman alone who’d triggered her anger. She was Martha’s age, and shiftless and stupid. Martha hadn’t found her way in the world yet, and girls of Martha’s age, perceiving diminishing returns, are as likely to cut their hair badly and go work for idiots as they are to dig in and try harder. She saw the possibility, in Martha, of a future of accepting second best just to have something and it terrified her. Emilia, the elder, was fully formed, even if she didn’t realize it, even if, like all first children, she felt like she’d been sent out into the world without a complete set of tools. But Emilia always landed on her feet; she was like her namesake, unflappable, possessed of solid common sense, and skeptical enough to avoid being taken in by dreamers and fools. Not so Martha, whose life had, thus far, been stocked by a rotating cast of lightweights, druggies, actors, depressives, and charlatans. She’d taken one look at Becca Portman and wanted to pound some sense into her. At least she hadn’t done that.

  She paid for the coffee and pulled around the corner to buy a Record from one of the boxes. Maybe Portman had disobeyed her, or Sunderland had overruled her, and Wingate would get his chance to see things unfold in a more measured fashion. But she opened the paper and the story wasn’t there. There was no mention of its returning, nor a reason given why it hadn’t appeared. So, whether Hazel liked it or not, the next phase of the game was afoot.

  She pulled back into traffic, the paper tossed into the back seat. There was no traffic at 5:45 in the morning, and she could have bombed down to Barrie in an hour, but she decided to drive at the limit and give herself some time to think, to go over her points. She found her mind too busy with the details of the mannequin and the man in the chair to focus. But she would have to put all of it aside if she wanted to get her message across to Willan.

  She pulled into OPSC headquarters at ten after seven. Twenty minutes early might look desperate, she thought, and she sat in the car for another ten minutes before going in through the front doors. The middle of her back had relaxed, finally, and she was grateful she wouldn’t have to look like a hunched old woman in front of her new boss. She had to be buzzed in by Willan’s assistant: the building didn’t open until eight. “Chip’s been here since six,” said the assistant, whose name was Jeremy. He calls his boss Chip? thought Hazel.

  At seven-thirty on the button, Commander Willan came to get her from the waiting area. He offered her a hearty handshake, and she took his hand and shook it distractedly, taking in the man who had come down the hallway to meet her. Willan was no older than thirty-five, tall and lean, with a glossy head of long black hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a dark blue powersuit instead of a uniform, and he had brilliant white dress sneakers on his feet. He looked like the head of an animation studio, not a police commander. He put a light hand on her back and led her into his office. She’d only seen Mason’s office twice in all his reign, and it had been cluttered with official regalia, including the force’s colours on a staff behind the desk. All of his awards and medals had been framed on the walls to the left and right. Nothing about Mason’s office let you forget that he had it over you in rank, experience, and decoration. It had been an office to cow all opposition.

  Willan’s office, on the other hand, was almost bare. Gone was the dark furniture, the leather chairs, replaced by a thick glass desktop supported by heavy silver legs. The only decoration in the room was a marble pillar with a sleek black ball on top of it, turning endlessly on a jet of water. A cord from the back of it ran discreetly along the side wall to a plug.

  The commander’s chair was a strange, ergonomic device that he kneeled on, tucking his feet beneath him, the seat itself tilted forward at about sixty degrees. When he sat in it, it gave the impression that he might spring out of it, over the glass table, and into your lap.

  Willan gestured to her to sit down and then he opened a wooden coffer on the desktop, taking a silver object from it, and pushed it over toward her. Were they going to smoke bloody cigars at seven-thirty in the morning? “Chocolate sardine?” he asked. She waved them off. “I’m an avid fisherman. And I have a sweet-tooth,” he said. “So I can’t resist them.” He unwrapped the fish and snapped it in half between his perfect teeth. “So, what a pleasure.”

  “Is it?” she said.

  “Absolutely. To meet the famous DI Micallef. I’m honoured.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said. There hadn’t been a trace of irony in his voice. “I’m glad we’re getting a chance to talk.”

  “Terrific,” he said. “So tell me what I can do for you.”

  Maybe she wouldn’t have to charm this Chip Willan; he had enough charm for both of them. “Well, Commander Willan -”

  “Good Lord,” he said, “it’s Chip, or you’re outta here.”

  “Okay, then. Chip.”

  “Hazel.”

  “I’ve come to talk about the future of policing in Westmuir County.”

  “Sweet.”

  She rubbed her palms against the tops of her legs. “Chip… I know that there are fiscal issues the OPS needs to tackle, and of course, every detachment in this province needs to find efficiencies” – she cringed inwardly to use the word – “but I’m here today to say that I hope Central understands that it can use its voice within the provincial federation to protect its communities. Places like Westmuir, with its rural and small-town populations, c
an’t be policed the same way a big city is policed, and I’m a little anxious about the things I hear, about some of the changes being discussed.”

  “Give me some specifics, Hazel. Specifics will help me see your issues more clearly.”

  “Well, one specific is the questionnaire you – your office – sent my personnel recently. Asking them for, among other things, their redeployment choices. As in, should there come a time when they might be redeployed, what would their preferences be and so on. Before any kind of mission statement has even been issued by the OPS, to ask people where they want to go in case of clawbacks… well, I find that, with all due respect, to be a little underhanded.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” said Chip Willan. “I apologize for that. You have to understand, Hazel, I’m still cutting my teeth here.”

  She felt herself relaxing into the chair. Thank God for new blood. Was this generation one that would actually allow itself to reason? “Okay, I’m glad you said that. Because I really feel we really need to sit down, all levels, and talk about what we need, and of course, keeping all of the fiscal issues in focus. But I think it would be educational, it would open your eyes, to see what we do with our resources, Chip. How well Westmuir’s detachments and community policing offices work and who they serve. And how, even though our police-to-population ratios seem high, they’re right for the places we work in. Hell, you know, we’re working on a case right now that couldn’t possibly be handled correctly if our detachments were centralized, or if there were fewer people to work on it. People’s lives depend on us being able to do the work we were trained to do, with the resources we need to do it with. It could be very bad for people if budget formulas invented for cities were applied willy-nilly to places like Westmuir County.”