The Night Bell Read online

  Macdonald had joined her beside the desk. He ran his finger along the length of the bone. “Maybe a cow or a pig bone? There’s been all kind of cattle- and pig-raising in those fields.”

  “What part do you live on?” Hazel asked the Fremonts.

  “Northwest part,” said the husband. “Where the invisible golf course is.”

  “Is this the only thing your dog has brought back?”

  “Sundancer brings all kinds of stuff back to the house,” said Mrs. Fremont.

  “Sundancer …” Hazel deadpanned.

  Mr. Fremont grimaced. “I got her a dog instead of a boat. That’s her revenge. I got you a bungalow, you know.”

  “Where the restless souls of dead natives stir in their clay,” said Mrs. Fremont.

  “It’s not an Indian bone, sweetheart.” He had a natural sneer.

  “Could it be a burial ground?” Hazel looked around the room to shrugging. She wrapped the bone back up in the napkin. “We’ll get this analyzed, OK? Does Sundancer just run wild everywhere?”

  “He can’t get into anyone’s yard because of all the fences,” said Mr. Fremont, “but the fence on our side ends before that old house.”

  “The old house?” Ray asked.

  “The old boys’ home,” Hazel said.

  “Ew,” said Sandy Fremont, showing her white teeth. “Is that the bone of a person, you think?”

  “People are going to want their money back over this kind of thing,” fumed her husband. “I mean, do you know what is going on down there?”

  “Going on?” Hazel asked.

  “This Ascot Group,” he said, lowering his voice, “it’s like a stack of Russian dolls, one corporation folded inside another. We’re on the board at the Acres. I see the financial statements. It’s like reading Klingon. And there hasn’t been any progress on construction, anywhere on the site, in three months. Three months!” he cried in a tragically hurt voice.

  “I’m sorry for the trouble you’re having with your new home,” Hazel said, “but right now we need to focus on this.” She closed the napkin. “If you want to make an official complaint about the situation in Tournament Acres, you can always do that through the right channels, I’m sure.”

  Mrs. Fremont arched an eyebrow at her husband. “See? That’s exactly what they said in Mayfair.”

  “Mayfair?” inquired Macdonald.

  “We’ve already tried to get the law involved,” she said. “But maybe you people don’t care if the folks getting ripped off are rich, huh?”

  Oscar Fremont stood up. “Maybe we’re not rich enough! Let’s go.”

  Hazel handed them each a card as they were leaving. “If … Sundancer finds anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”

  Oscar Fremont said, “Ha.”

  Hazel brought cinnamon buns home for dinner. Her mother’s sweet tooth was still functioning, and if that’s what it took, then cinnamon buns it would be.

  She bought three but asked for two bags. She hid one bag in the car and went in with the other two buns. She’d talk her mother into eating one to save Hazel from eating it herself. Some nights now, though, she was getting two and a half cinnamon buns.

  The problem with painlessness is that it wakes your appetite, she thought. All kinds of appetites, even the ones you thought were in full abeyance. She’d gone a whole year now without so much as a twinge in her lower back. Her spinal surgery was well behind her, and the doctor had told her that with time the scarring would heal, the discs would continue to shrink – lessening the possibility of another rupture – and she’d find herself drug-free and fully operational.

  There were days when she could almost touch her toes. If it weren’t for her gut.

  “In two more years you’re going to look like a set of stacking rings,” her mother said. “You know, the kind they give to babies?”

  Hazel laughed. “Eat your bun.”

  “Stop buying two of them. I only want half, and you don’t need the half I can’t finish.” Emily liked to slice the bun in half horizontally and spread butter on each side. Her appetite was better in the evening, right after the sun went down, and her energy improved as well. She’d fill with a colour much improved over cadaverous. There was something unnatural about the transformation, however welcome it was.

  She slept so much now that it was only between the hours of seven and eleven that there’d be more than hints of her true self.

  “There’s a new show I want to watch tonight,” she said, pushing her plate away with some finality.

  “A cop show?”

  “I like my cop shows.”

  “My life is a cop show, Mother. For once I’d like to watch a comedy.” She was looking at the second cinnamon bun. “Well, we’re not going to waste all of this. I’ll put the whole one in the fridge and I’ll finish yours, since you seem so excited about it.”

  Emily Micallef made her eyes into pin lights. She picked up the half and the whole second bun and threw them both into the garbage over Hazel’s protests. “I know you buy three of them, piggy. You don’t fool me for an instant.”

  Hazel arrived at work at eight o’clock the next morning. Ray intercepted her at the back door.

  “Jack’s coming in,” he said.

  “A house call?”

  “What do you say we get Fraser in the office with us?”

  “Why?”

  Ray looked around awkwardly for a moment. “Look, I appreciate that James is coming along and it’s really terrific to see him doing better, but I’m down a detec –”

  “Dietrich Fraser’s not a detective.”

  “He’s got SOCO training. And he’s been talking about taking the exam.”

  “I didn’t realize we were doing co-op here.” He smiled tolerantly. “OK. But I’m still keeping James in the loop.”

  “I never said you had to stop. But I need someone else on this. I need someone with some field experience, and Fraser has good eyes.”

  “Where is he then?”

  They went to the front to look for Fraser, but it turned out he had left the station house for ten minutes. She passed by Peter MacTier in dispatch. “You know where Kraut is?”

  MacTier shook his head, but it wasn’t to say no.

  “What?”

  “He went to buy toilet paper.”

  “For?”

  “Here. He doesn’t like our toilet paper.”

  “He has terrible piles,” Hazel said. “Go easy on him. Don’t tell anyone I told you about the piles, OK? Send him into 2 when he gets back.”

  Jack Deacon, coroner at Mayfair General and OPS Central’s chief forensic pathologist, entered by the front door and Hazel led him into Interview 2. Ray Greene stood to greet him, but he received no response from the doc. Deacon was silent all the way in to the room.

  He sat down at the head of the table. She and Ray joined him on his left and right, and the doctor pulled a resealable bag out of his coat pocket. Sundancer’s bone was inside it. “The vertebra I’m not done with yet, although I am about ninety per cent sure it’s human.” He unzipped the bag and shook the bone out gently onto the tabletop. “This,” he said, standing back from it as if it were radioactive, “I’m a hundred per cent sure about. It’s the iliac crest of an adolescent boy. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.”

  “What is –”

  “The top ridge of the pelvis bone, Commander.” He showed them on his body, pulling his lab coat up and cocking a hip at them. “This. Been gnawed at by animals or hacked at, from the look of it.”

  “Which do you think it is? Gnawed or hacked?”

  “I’d put my money on steel over teeth.”

  They all looked at it in grave silence.

  “A boy,” Greene said. “How do you know?”

  “We’re shaped differently.” Deacon ran his finger along the outside curve of the bone. “The male pelvis is taller, thinner, the iliac curves inward more. The female is broader and deeper. This is a boy.”

  �
��Not a man.”

  “No.”

  “So is it from a grave?” Hazel asked. “Is there an old graveyard?”

  “Impossible to say. But it would be strange for a single bone to turn up if it was a graveyard. Even with machines turning the dirt over, you’d think there’d be much more.”

  “Maybe there is more,” said Hazel.

  “And that’s why they stopped work on the golf courses,” Ray said, flashing on an idea. “Who wants to risk their well-heeled clients swatting some kid’s skull out of a sand trap? That’s why they’re building low-rises instead.”

  “Cover it up, literally, with buildings,” Hazel said. “But Oscar Fremont said they stopped construction three months ago. Maybe management knows it has a problem. They erected fences to keep people in their houses and not out hiking and stumbling across bits of Buddy.”

  Greene leaned in to get a closer look at the fragment of iliac crest. “I bet there are a lot of people involved in Tournament Acres who wouldn’t want it defined as a crime scene.”

  “If we go,” said Deacon, resuming his professorial air, “with the theory that the marks on the bone are from its being chopped, hacked, stabbed, or otherwise butchered, then we must conclude that the wounds are post-mortem and the body was broken down by accident or on purpose.”

  “Well, you know where it was found.”

  “Certainly. You also see that this amount of knife work is overkill for the purposes of murder. So the cause of death is so far a mystery.” Jack Deacon was bloodlessly professional. Hazel liked that about him, but she doubted outside of work that he was a barrel of monkeys either.

  “How old is it?” Greene asked.

  Deacon picked the bone up and put it back into the evidence bag. “It’s not recent. I only have a UV in my lab; I have to send this down to Toronto for nitrogen and amino analysis. But it’s at least … thirty years old? Forty? Two hundred? We’ll know in a couple of days.”

  Constable Dietrich “Kraut” Fraser entered, out of breath. “Sorry.”

  “You get your toilet paper for your soft bottom?” said Hazel.

  “Jack,” he said. Ignoring her and offering his hand.

  “Dietrich.”

  “It’s a kid’s bone,” Hazel said. “Around fifteen years old. Top of his pelvis –”

  “Iliac crest,” said Deacon.

  “A kid,” she repeated. “Fourteen, fifteen. Hacked up.”

  Now Fraser sat. “Jesus.”

  “A heavy blade chopped through it here,” said Jack Deacon, “and here. And these marks are hacks that didn’t break bone. Could be when it got tossed through a combine maybe –”

  “A combine?”

  “The field, Kraut,” Hazel said. She gestured impatiently at Deacon. “Continue.”

  “This bone could have been ploughed up any number of times and moved all over.”

  “Right. Is it possible it’s from a buri –”

  “He doesn’t know,” said Hazel. “But he thinks it’s unlikely. We’re going to need to sweep that field.”

  “God,” said Fraser, taking the bag from the pathologist. He held the bone up to his eye. “How do we know it’s human, though?”

  “He knows,” said Hazel. “We need a team. There’s more out there.”

  “You’re going to need a dozen people,” Ray said.

  “It’s twenty hectares. We’ll need more than a dozen.”

  “I’ll see who I can get from Mayfair.”

  “Call Barrie,” Hazel said. “I’m going to call Brendan Givens. How much do you want to bet Honey Eisen and the Fremonts aren’t the first people to uncover a bone in that place. Maybe he’s got a whole skeleton in that desk of his.”

  Fraser nodded sagely. “I bet that’s why they stopped building the golf –”

  “Get here on time, Sergeant,” she said, “and you can take part in the cogitating.”

  ] 6 [

  Thursday, October 18, afternoon

  They tasked fifteen uniforms to sweep the field. There was no use in complaining. Willan had sent six Mayfair officers, including Victoria Torrance, and two of his scene-of-crime officers. A few other bodies came in from other detachments and Hazel had two other SOCOs apart from Fraser: sergeants Gerry Costamides and Melvin Renald. Macdonald had begged to be included, but after his last appearance at Tournament Acres he didn’t put up a fight when Hazel told him he was staying home. They’d be eighteen in total. They took two vans out of Port Dundas.

  Over the phone, Brendan Givens had been apoplectic. Why didn’t they come back on Monday, when there would be fewer people around to upset? Hazel told him they’d be there in two hours.

  She rode in the van with Costamides and Renald. Costamides hated Renald’s driving and spent the ride glaring at him. Hazel bounced around in the back seat. “You think you can slow down?” Gerry said. “The only unit that doesn’t have to drive fast, but Heavyfoot here thinks there’s no speed limit.”

  “I’ve got things to do later today,” said Renald. “How big is this place?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, Mel. A number of acres.”

  “We don’t have kliegs,” he said. “We’ll work to sundown, then I’m out.”

  “You’re out when I say you’re out.”

  “I’m out when Ray Greene says I’m out. It’s a waste of resources to dig in the dark.”

  Hazel wasn’t terribly fond of Melvin anyway, but now he was really getting on her nerves. It was no secret his marriage was ending, nor that it was probably time to reassign him, but the threat of the downsizing that was coming with amalgamation had been inspiring him to keep it all under control: the drinking, the depression, his on-duty behaviour. He’d been in the OPS for thirty years – bouncing around detachments and grinding out his days to retirement. He arrived at Port Dundas in 2002, dragging a sheaf of warnings and citations behind him, but he’d been a pretty good cop. She’d only noticed him slipping in the last couple of years.

  Brendan Givens met them on the stone porch of the clubhouse. Gaston Bellefeuille stood behind him by the door, his arms crossed over his chest. “I warned you about this,” Givens said to Hazel. “People are muckraking.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to do the same now,” she replied. Renald and Costamides were unloading their kits as the second van pulled up. At the sight of it, Givens blanched and looked over at his security guard, who shrugged.

  “Ask ’em if they have a warrant.”

  “Of course we have a warrant,” Hazel said. “We’re rather organized about these sorts of things.”

  Givens, aghast, watched more vans arrive. “Why do you need so many people?”

  “We need them to make a grid on your unbuilt golf course and make sure there aren’t any more surprises out there.”

  “I’ve walked the land for that second course a hundred times,” he protested. “It’s cornstalks and good Canadian Shield, that’s what it is. You’ll see for yourselves.”

  “I guess we will. How many more bones have you locked up in your desk, Mr. Givens? I presume you’ve disposed of them.”

  “What bones?”

  “Why didn’t you get rid of the vertebra?”

  His face coloured. “I liked it.” Hazel shouldered past Bellefeuille, and he followed her in. “We’re dealing with enough bad publicity as it is,” Givens said urgently in her ear. “People shouldn’t be taking matters into their own hands! That’s why we have a shareholders’ committee, a board of directors … there’s a time and a place for everything.”

  “It sounds like your various committees and shareholders have no power over locals armed with office supplies.”

  “Forget about Honey Eisen!” He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “And you don’t think the Fremonts aren’t up to butchering a chicken and then claiming they found human remains on their property? Oscar Fremont fashions himself a muckety-muck.”

  “It’s not a chicken.”

  “Do you know who Fremont is?”

  “
No.”

  The others had stopped. “Insurance,” said Givens. “Home, life, car, injury, you name it. He’d insure your toenails if you wanted him to. He owns his company. They have two floors in Yorkville in Toronto. You know what these people are good at? Not paying.”

  “I don’t see the angle, Brendan.”

  “They want out. They’ll default, sue, and then others will follow. I know he’s talking to people.”

  “Did he put seventy-two-year-old Honey Eisen up to cracking your kneecap with a pen holder?”

  “Maybe,” he said, pressing his lips together. There was one big bead of sweat forming in his right eyebrow. When his face got tight he looked like Jimmy Durante. What was that kind of nose called? Spoonbill? Bulb? “Just do what you have to do, and when you don’t find anything out there, I want to talk to you again. We have as much right to your protection as anyone else.”

  “Who’s we?” asked Fraser, coming past with a bundle of hockey-stick shafts bound up with velcro straps.

  Givens ignored him. To Hazel he said, “The businesspeople who keep Westmuir County in the black, that’s who. Those of us who are working hard to pump up the economy in a part of the province where soybeans aren’t worth what they used to be!”

  “I’ll keep your good works and that of the Ascot Group in mind as we poke around, OK?” she said.

  They were shown through the main part of the clubhouse to the restaurant, and out onto the long patio that faced what was supposed to be one of the golf courses, but which was enclosed by a slatted wood fence seven feet high. On the inside, it was hung with pretty planters, and stained a warm, dark colour. Hazel guessed the fence hadn’t been in the original plans.

  Patrons and guests enjoying a late lunch in the shadow of this fence looked up at the appearance of so many uniforms. Givens was instructing the waiters to busy themselves with their customers. He led the search party to a locked gate in the fence, but Hazel stepped onto a wooden bench partway there and peered over. It was a wasteland beyond, with unstained versions of this same fence creating an unbroken border around about three-quarters of the development. To her right, houses ranged up along the 15th Sideroad (now Pebble Beach Boulevard). The completed ten holes were to her right as well, and looking to the north, there was a mix of trees and bramble where the earthmovers had stopped carving out the final eight holes of the first course. From where she stood it was forty football fields of neglected land hemmed in by fences that were designed to keep it from view. “Pretty country,” she said.