The Taken Read online

  A path in the alleyway between houses led to a gate. He pulled the little string that opened the latch and went into the little laneway separating them. There was a second gate leading into his old backyard; the same old string that lifted the latch hung out from between the slats. In the tiny yard behind – there had only ever been enough space there for a couple of tomato plants in tubs and maybe a little pot of basil – he went directly to the corner farthest away from the gate and got on his knees. Luckily, nobody walked back here and the soil was pretty loose, so he could dig at it with his hands. How he hated to get his nails all dirty, but this had to be done, and so he dug concertedly until his nails scraped against the top of something made of wood. He worked around the object until he’d revealed a little damaged casket big enough to hold a bowling ball.

  No one had seen him. He knew people barely paid attention in cities. You could get away with anything in cities if you were just a bit careful. You could get away with murder.

  He drove at a good clip back to the house, made it in ninety minutes, and parked in the rear. Before he went in, he grabbed a little round tin from the shed in the garden, of the type that once held pastilles. Her body was exactly where he’d left it (he’d had, perhaps, an ounce of doubt about that, considering the fact that it had found its way to his house), and he kneeled beside it and opened the little wooden box. Her head – green, shrivelled, hollow – was inside. He laid it on the floor, face-up, pressing the two halves of her cut throat together. Dirt trickled out of her dry eye sockets. The little pastille tin was full of fishhooks and he used them to pin her head to her neck, a neat little row of black, gleaming stitches. When the last one was on, she sat bolt upright in her place and swivelled her face to him. Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel. “Hello, Nick,” she said. “Long time.”

  “Not long enough,” he said.

  Sergeant Costamides laid the pages down flat and slipped her glasses off. “Well, that was interesting.”

  Her audience appeared riveted. “Keep going,” said Hazel.

  “I just want to get this straight. Someone has dropped off a two-year-old corpse at this gentleman’s house, and he’s not in the least surprised to see it, so he goes back to his old house -”

  “- in Toronto,” said Wingate.

  “Yes, and digs up the victim’s head so he can have a chat with her.”

  Fraser studied his copy of the story. He said, “That seems to be it.”

  “Okay,” said Costamides, and she smiled brightly at them. “Just checking. Chapter five.”

  “What am I going to do with you?” said Nick Wise, leaning against his bathroom door. The dead girl was standing at his sink, gazing at herself in the mirror.

  “I look like shit,” she said.

  “You look like death warmed over.” She smiled at him in the reflection, one of those playful, sexy smiles that used to do wonders for him. It made him a little sad to see it, but he put the feeling aside. “I’m serious, sweetheart. You can’t be seen wandering around. People’ll talk.”

  “I bet they will.” She opened his medicine cabinet and pushed aside a can of shaving cream and a bottle of Tylenol and lifted out a comb. She closed the mirror, and her face came back into view and she began to pull the comb through her twisted, ratty hair. It came out in clumps. “Goddamnit,” she said, “I had awesome hair.”

  “I told you it was over between us, doll, but that wasn’t good enough for you. You could never take no for an answer.”

  “You never said it was over, Nick.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “You never said it.” Her eyes rested on his in the mirror, knowing.

  “Well, showing you didn’t fucking work either, did it? Because here you are.”

  She turned away from the mirror now, and he saw her eyes were gleaming with tears. One rolled down a cracked, brown cheek, washing the dirt clean and revealing pink skin beneath. “But you called me back, Nick. Why did you do that? If you really didn’t want me anymore?”

  “Just because I remember you doesn’t mean I want you.”

  She was crying now, crying for real, and as the tears swept down her dirty cheeks, they wiped away the dry, encrusted dirt, and she was under there, her true face. Those round cheeks, the full, gentle mouth. Why would anyone have ever hurt her? When all she knew was how to love?

  “Maybe you called me back for another reason? Maybe you had second thoughts?” She was walking backwards through the bathroom door, back into the house, her hands supplicating in front of her. “Maybe you really did want everyone to know about us?”

  He was following her back into the living room, as if magnetized to her. He could not tell a lie: he remembered now how much he’d loved her, how, in the beginning, when they lived in that house together, he would have done anything for her. Why the heart runs out of fuel for loving was a mystery that had evaded him over and over in his life. He’d always been one to lose heart, to see his passions fade, and he’d never known why.

  “Because you’ve never really made anything of yourself,” she said. She was standing over the tarp, and she was whole and unclothed, the way she was that night, that last night. She tilted her head at him and her luxuriant bronze hair fell over one breast. “But you had your chance, didn’t you?”

  “I should have burned you up, so there was nothing left of you. I should have chopped you into little pieces -”

  “Why didn’t you, Nick? Why didn’t you just have done with me and no one would ever have found me?”

  “I won’t make that mistake again,” he said and he wheeled and strode into the kitchen to find his weapon. It was lying on its side on the counter beside the stove, and he snatched it up and then went down the hall to his office. A sheaf of paper lay on his desk, months’ worth of work, and he strode back down the hall, brandishing it in front of him. In his other hand, he held the lighter.

  She saw him and laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it, Nick? I mean, it’s like you conjured me out of thin air and now you want to make me vanish again? Again? You’re just not that good, honey.”

  He lit the paper and it flared in his hands like a magician’s trick. And then, just as quickly, it was ash at his feet and he was alone. The room was empty. The walls were blank. He was standing in a room with no windows and just a single closed door in one wall. The light flooded in and he looked up and she was standing above him now, towering over him, a giant, and she leaned her face down into the light, her angry, tearful face, and she almost blotted out the light. “You better hope they learn the truth about me before it’s too late, Nick.”

  “Where am I?” he said, a note of fear finally creeping into his voice.

  “Why, honey, you’re caught in a lie,” she said, and then she closed the lid of the box. In the deep, awful dark, he heard the door in the wall open.

  A voice said, “You’re inside it now, aren’t you, Wise?”

  Nick looked around. “Who… me?”

  “Draw closer.”

  He waited to hear more, but there was only silence and darkness.

  Costamides flipped the last page of the story, in case there was more, but she looked up at them shrugging, and laid the papers aside. “Well, if you were wondering how your friend on the internet ended up in that basement -”

  “We know as little now as we did twenty minutes ago,” Hazel said.

  Fraser was staring down at the pages. “And we’re thinking of letting the Record run this shit?”

  “Is that our prime concern right now?” asked Wingate. “Whether they run it or not, we have to decide what it means to us and what our next move is going to be.” He held up his sheaf of papers. Hazel had noticed he’d been underlining words on it. “If I understand this correctly, we’re being alerted to a murder, as well as a suspect.”

  “Or someone wants to watch us dance like marionettes,” said Fraser.

  “If we’re marionettes,” said Haz
el, “I think we better learn our parts. Whoever this is, they want people to see everything. Which is why they want this in the paper.”

  “I don’t care what the fuck they want,” said Fraser. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “You’re forgetting about their collateral,” she said to him. “We have to at least give the appearance of cooperation. Or we’re going to find a body on our doorstep, and I’m not sure it would stop there.” She jutted her chin at Wingate’s copy of the story. “What were you writing?”

  He flipped back to the first page. “I don’t know what you’re all thinking, but I read chapters one and two, like, ten times, and I don’t think three through five were written by the same person. The beginning was, well, it was bad. This isn’t exactly…”

  “Dickens?” said Hazel.

  He smiled at her, a little shyly. “Yeah. But it’s better than what preceded it.”

  “Practice makes perfect,” said Costamides.

  “No,” said Hazel, “the agenda has changed since those first chapters. It’s not a story anymore. It’s… it’s a map of some kind.”

  “If we choose to believe it,” said Fraser, harshly. “And mind you, even if we do, how the hell do we know exactly what we’re believing in?”

  “We’re being asked to figure that out,” said Wingate. He spread his fingertips on top of the pages, making a bridge over them. “The story is our guide. The stuff on the internet is for us to keep track of how we’re doing.”

  “And how are we doing?” asked Costamides.

  “We fall any further behind,” said Fraser, “they might start to run out of body parts to send us.”

  Wingate ignored him. “Well, I noticed that he uses the word damage a lot. He says it when he’s sitting at the table, and then he talks about the water damaging the floor. And he does it somewhere else too, but I can’t find it.”

  “The box he digs up in the backyard is ‘damaged,’” said Hazel. “It might mean something.”

  “He’s doing the crossword at the beginning, isn’t he?” said Costamides. They all flipped back to the first page of chapter four. “‘Damaged’ is in the clue.” She looked up. “What’s a word that means ‘damaged’?”

  “Broken,” said Wingate. “Smashed.”

  “Something that’s ‘damaged’ isn’t necessarily completely ruined.”

  “Damn it,” said Hazel. “I know what it is.” They all looked at her. “It’s a cryptic clue, like for a crossword. Damaged or broken or messy – words like that – they signal anagrams.”

  They all turned their eyes back on the page. “Surely we’re not thinking this whole thing is, like, a palindrome?” said Fraser.

  “No,” she said. “But something has to be rearranged before it makes sense. A detail or a word.”

  “Fine. What, though?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazel.

  The four of them stared at the pages. To Hazel’s eyes, the longer she looked, the more the letters and words seemed like meaningless marks against a vast, empty field.

  Her phone rang and she picked it up. It was Melanie. “I’m putting him on speakerphone,” she said.

  It was Spere. “It’s official, people. The hand in Deacon’s freezer once held that computer mouse.” There was silence from the room. “We had to digitize the layers of prints, but we were able to separate and collate. We have a match.”

  “Well, I guess that means I don’t have to play the rabid fan up at the missus’s house to shake loose a drinking glass,” said Fraser. “Good work, Howard.”

  “Yeah, good work,” said Hazel. She reached forward and punched the disconnect. For the first time in this case, something was as it seemed. Her eyes were drawn to the computer screen, which continued to show its plea in blood. “What did you do?” she said quietly to it and then she slowly turned her gaze on the others. “What did Colin Eldwin do?”

  19

  She gave Melanie a couple of tasks. The first was to connect her with the Westmuir Record. A panicked Rebecca Portman came on the line. “Mr. Sunderland is on the warpath,” she said. “He just called from Atlanta and I had to tell him about our Thursday edition. I, um, have a message he made me write down. He told me to read it to you.”

  “I didn’t call you, Miss Portman, to pick up messages from your boss.”

  “I’m sorry, but, just the way he sounded…”

  “I have a couple of needs you can take care of for me. Do I still have your attention?” Portman murmured that she did. “The first thing is, I’ve decided you can run Colin Eldwin’s story again. In fact, I want you to run both chapters four and five in Monday’s edition.”

  “Both?”

  “Yes. Is that going to get you in trouble again?”

  “I’m afraid it will. Maybe I should read you Mr. Sunderland’s message, Ma’am? He asked me to read it to you.”

  “Does it have the word feckless in it?”

  “Um…” She was scanning the note. “Not exactly.”

  “Is your boyfriend in today?”

  “Who?”

  “Beaker, Miss Portman, your nervous little friend in IT. I want him in my station house in fifteen minutes. Tell him to put all the emails Colin Eldwin has sent you – all of them – on a CD and have them bring it over to me. I have some questions for him.”

  She thought she could hear Portman’s heart pounding over the phone. “He’s uh, not in today, Detective. Friday is usually pretty quiet.”

  Hazel wanted to reach through the phone and wring the little dope’s neck. “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Um -”

  “Tell him I won’t keep him long. And I’m ‘Detective Inspector’ to you.”

  “Sorry, Ma’am.” Hazel closed her eyes and held her tongue. “He really wants me to read this note to you.”

  Cartwright appeared in the doorway. Hazel covered the mouthpiece. “What?”

  “Mr. Pedersen says he’s having brunch with his wife. Is it urgent?”

  “Tell him to come in when he’s done. And if he’s at Ladyman’s have him bring me a peameal bacon sandwich.”

  She put the phone back to her ear. Portman was evidently reciting Sunderland ’s message. “‘… and don’t think I won’t.’ I’m sorry for the strong language, Ma’am. But he insisted.”

  “My ears are burning. Tell him you could hear me swallowing nervously. Hey, do you want to know what we called your boss in high school?”

  “No.”

  “We called him ‘Pokey’ because he was always in other people’s business. Probably the boys called him that too because he had a small penis. He might still answer to it.” There was silence on the other end. “Send me your little friend, Miss Portman. Burn him his CD if you know how, and get him over here. He has thirteen minutes now.”

  Hubert Mackie – that was the kid’s name – showed up fourteen minutes later, out of breath and looking panicked. Cartwright offered him a cup of coffee, but he told her coffee made him sweat and she gave him a glass of water instead. He was wearing a black cloth jacket with a broken zipper and his wispy hair kept falling over his forehead. “I guess we’re going to need a computer,” he said, and Hazel led him out to Wingate’s work station. The kid walked through the pen with his head down, muttering “hello” left and right and pushing his hair away from his eyes.

  Hazel pulled the chair out for him, and Mackie sat, apologizing as he did, and Hazel asked him if he wanted a sedative.

  “Oh no, Ma’am, that’d just make me sleepy.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  “What is it you were wanting to know, Ma’am?”

  “That story the paper is running – did the chapters all come from the same email address?”

  He’d popped the CD into Wingate’s drive and was waiting for it to show up on his desktop. “I had Rebecca turn the emails you wanted to see into rtfs to make things easier.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Just text files, Ma’am. They’ll open in any word p
rocessor.”

  His fingers flew over the keyboard. He used the first two fingers of each hand to type and he seemed to be faster than Cartwright with all ten. The windows started opening on the screen, blooming and expanding until there were more than a dozen. “Thirteen in total, Ma’am.”

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “There’s his email address right there,” the kid said, putting his finger against the screen. The address read [email protected].

  “Is it always the same? Like, is it coming from the same email address every time?”

  “Yeah,” said Mackie.

  “So that means it’s him writing to you guys.”

  “Well, it’s his email address.”

  “Is that a ‘yes’?” she said, getting impatient.

  “It’s just that, you know, when you write an email, there’s an IP address attached to the ISP both sending and receiving the email -”

  “English, Beaker!”

  “I’m trying!” He hunched over the keyboard for a second, making an effort to become invisible. He spoke faster now. “IP: Internet Protocol. Every machine, you know, a computer or a device of any kind, that’s connected to a network – like the internet – has an IP address. It’s a unique identifier, it tells you where the device is located. Most of the time. ISP: Internet Service Provider. Simply said, your email originates at one IP address, that of your ISP, and arrives at another, the IP of your recipient’s ISP.”

  “Fine. Where were these emails sent from?”

  The kid started cycling through the text files. He ran his finger down a long string of gobbledegook that preceded the first bunch of the email messages. “Well, these all both originate and terminate at a Mayfair hub.” He quickly put his hands in the air to keep Hazel from yelling at him again. “A hub is the physical location where the ISP has its computers, and where all information is received, processed, and/or sent along. Eldwin’s provider is Ontcom, which has a hub in Mayfair, and ours is Caneast, which does too. So he sent these from his computer to the Ontcom servers, they sent them along to the Caneast servers, and we uploaded them to our hard drives from the Caneast servers.”