The Taken Read online

  She returned her attention to the screen. The camera was midway through its usual movement. In a minute, it would terminate on that mysterious, nervous leg. She watched it until it did. Was this the house? The house where a corpse with a note attached to it had just been dropped off, according to “The Mystery of Bass Lake”? She didn’t want to make the wrong connections, but her mind was eager to find a link, any link, between these things.

  She looked at her watch. It was just past noon. In three hours, the highways heading south were going to fill with sad revellers returning to the city, and she was going to have to have more cars on the road to deal with the inevitable mess. Like the first snowfall of the year, when it seemed as if people simply lost their minds, the end of the Victoria Day weekend always meant a massive traffic snafu. By 5 p.m. every tow truck in the county would be on call.

  She popped the lid of her Percocets and gazed into the vial. There were still twenty or more left in the bottle. She put one of the white pills in her mouth and swallowed it dry. On Sunday, she’d taken only two, and at their correct intervals. And she’d had only one this morning, but foresaw it would take at least three to get through the day, and she knew the next one she took would be more out of want than need. If she could get down to only the ones she needed, then she’d come off them. It was probably a good idea to come off them. Soon.

  She knew, and she’d been told, how addicting these pills were, but she’d been on them in one form or another for almost three years, and although she depended on them now, she still told herself she was not dependent on them. And if she was, wouldn’t someone tell her? Wouldn’t someone notice? In any case, if she really wanted to stop, she would and could. Of course she knew addicts always told themselves they could stop at any time, so her confidence was not evidence one way or the other.

  But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses were things she could exercise her will over when she wanted to. The things you told yourself tended to come true, and Hazel told herself she did not have a problem. If she did, she’d have to wait until she was out of the woods before she dealt with it.

  She checked the screen on her desk again and watched the feed from the beginning of the pan. Now that she knew how it ended, just the sight of the waterstained back wall of the space was enough to get her heart pounding. She stared at it, willing it to show her something new, and her phone rang. She jumped.

  “Jesus,” she said into the receiver.

  “No, Spere.”

  “Tell me you’ve got something for me, Howard.”

  “Nothing good,” he said. “The DNS number resolves to gobbledegook. Not even a provider we can trace comes up. It’s just out there, beaming in from outer space, for all we know.”

  “What about those pictures James sent you? What are they?”

  “Just badly exposed snaps, I’m afraid. I’ve sent them to Allen Barry, our imaging guy, but he’s in Toronto, so it might be a while before he weighs in.”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  “A pleasure as usual,” said Howard Spere.

  8

  Burt Levitt’s store was still called Micallef’s; it had been the town’s largest clothing store since 1890, and no one was ever going to change its name. It had been sold to Levitt after Hazel’s father died in 1988, and when people came in asking for Mr. Micallef, he presented himself without correcting them. In small towns like Port Dundas, the forces of multinational retail had been successfully held at bay for a long time, but now the tendrils of Walmart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse and other bottom-liners were reaching further and further, and a cornfield to the south of town had been asphalted over and planted with big box stores. Levitt was feeling it, but not as badly as the mom-and-pop grocery stores, the few that had survived on the main drag. His time was coming, he knew it, but there were still enough of the older generation who were loyal to him that he could keep going.

  James Wingate had never seen the store in its heyday. The ceiling was still wired with the capsule and pulley system that had once been used to shoot cash from various departments to the cashier, who sat at the back of the store, receiving payments and making change, which would be ferried back across the ceiling to the customer. Hazel could remember the sound of the little compartments zipping over her head and the squeak of a wooden cup being unscrewed to disgorge its contents. Micallef’s was the only store in Ontario to still have its original cash trolley.

  Now the system was dusty and rusted in places and the various departments had been collapsed to make a single room. Levitt had cut employees back from the five who came with the store in 1988 to three, including himself. James had never been inside the store before now, and it had never occurred to him, in his six months in Port Dundas, to go in. But crossing its threshold, he was reminded of the Simpson’s store at Yonge and Queen streets in Toronto that his mother had taken him to to shop for a suit when he was nine. It smelled the same way and the fixtures looked the same. He had the instinct that Levitt would know something about mannequins.

  Levitt, now almost eighty, came around from the cash desk and shook Wingate’s hand. “I’d heard rumours about new blood during that nastiness with poor Delia Chandler, but I admit this is the first time I have proof of your existence, Sir.”

  “I guess it’s a good sign that you rarely see a detective in the shop.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Levitt. “Even detectives have to buy underwear.”

  Wingate smiled sadly and made a mental note to come to Main Street next time he needed something. He unsnapped his dossier case and pulled out three pictures of the Gannon Lake mannequin. His walkie buzzed; it was Hazel. He said, “I’m where you told me to go,” and he turned it off. He held the pictures out to Levitt. “Hazel sent me over to show you these. It’s of something we found. We’re wondering what you make of it.”

  Levitt took the pictures from Wingate and retreated to his cash desk, where he spread the pictures out in a row and put his glasses on to look at them. “Rather beat up, isn’t she?”

  “Where would a person get something like this?”

  Levitt took his glasses off. “Oh, there’s all kinds of places you could buy a mannequin. Or steal one. You can even buy them online now. This girl is rather old, though – not quite as old as mine, but not exactly up to date.”

  “Would you know if you were missing one?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “But I’ve never had anything like this. I’d guess she was at least twenty years old. The new ones now are much more realistic, and you can get them Chinese, overweight, black, short, voluptuous, whatever you want. You’d think you were shopping for a mail-order bride from looking at the manufacturers’ catalogues.”

  Wingate looked around the store. All of Levitt’s mannequins were headless. He realized he preferred headless mannequins to the headed ones: mannequin faces sent a chill down his spine. He recalled a horror film he’d seen in his teens where store mannequins came to life. Had the person who’d sunk their mannequin seen the same film? “Is there a place where unloved mannequins go? Like some kind of mannequin dump?”

  “Yeah,” said Levitt. “It’s called eBay.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. So we have little or no chance of figuring out where this one came from.”

  “Even if your girl still had a mouth, I doubt she’d be able to tell you anything.”

  Wingate thanked Levitt and went back out onto the sidewalk and started back toward the station house. Then he stopped and took his PNB out of his pocket and wrote “Headless also = mouthless. Silenced.”

  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 grea
t 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.

  9

  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?”

&
nbsp; “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?”