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?”

“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?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“He’s big. People call him bearlike. But not fat, just a big man. He has a beard and -”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yeah, that’s all I need to know.”

Paritas kept her gaze on Hazel, and then decided she wasn’t going to press her luck. She crossed one leg over the other. “Are we allowed to smoke in here?”

“Not since 1998. Let’s talk about your fishing expedition. You say you didn’t see a body coming out of Gannon Lake, but it was on the end of your line. So what did you see?”

“I really have no idea,” said Paritas. “By the time it was coming out of the water, Pat had taken over. It was too heavy for me to reel in. I just caught a flash of it. It was round and sort of orange and green. It had lines on it, I think.”

“You know, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out for bass.”

“I’m not. It’s Dean’s thing. He has about twenty stuffed fish on the wall of his house. He doesn’t even eat them. I go out with him once a year and he goes to the craft show with me. It’s a trade. It would be different if he ate them, but he says he’s into the ‘sport’ of it.”

“Did Dean see what was on your line?”

“Yeah. He said it was a buoy or something.”

“Don’t buoys float?”

Paritas sighed. “I’m honestly not an expect, Detective. Inspector, I mean. If you want to talk to Dean, I can give you his number.” Hazel turned her notebook to Paritas and laid her finger on the number they had for Bellocque. “That’s it,” said Paritas.

“It’s out of order.”

“Oh. I’ll mention it to him.”

Hazel smiled at Paritas with a tilted head. “Handy, huh, the two of you go out fishing, find something that might have been a body on the lakebed, and then you’re unreachable for the rest of the weekend.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Does Dean have internet access at his house?”

Gil Paritas laughed. “That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know Dean, obviously.”

“No… no, I don’t,” said Hazel. “Tell me about him.”

“He can fix anything with his hands, any mechanical little thing. He’s got projects all over the house. It’s how he makes a living. Fixes people’s washing machines, wires houses, digs septic tanks. It’s how we met.”

“He dug your septic tank?”

“It was more romantic than it sounds.”

“It would have to be.” She poised her pen over the PNB. “What’s the address?”

“Of what?”

“The house where Mr. Bellocque dug your septic tank?”

“Oh,” said Paritas, waving her hands in front of her. “That place is long gone. It was just outside of Gilmore. But I sold it after my divorce.”

“You’re divorced, are you? When was that?”

“What’s my divorce got to do with anything?”

Hazel thought about that. “Nothing, I guess. So you stay with Dean now if you come up to Gilmore.”

“That’s right.”

“Fine, then. You were saying he’s good with tools.”

“Well, he’s good with real things. But computers? The internet? Forget it. He thinks it’s modern witchcraft.”

“So your boyfriend wouldn’t have a webcam or anything like -”

“Honestly, I told you, he’s not my boyfriend. I’m fifty-four, for god’s sake. I don’t have a boyfriend. He’s just a… a friend. He lends me a hand once in a while.”

“I’m sure he does. So what is he then? What is the nature of your relationship?”

Paritas looked down at the tabletop, wiped away some invisible smudge with her finger. “Can I ask what my relationship with Dean has to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” said Hazel, brightly. “Let’s move on. Why were you fishing where you were fishing?”

“There was nothing biting. Pat said she knew a better spot.”

“So it was Pat’s idea to fish there.”

“She’s the one who knows the lake.”

“Did she seem… eager for either of you to fish that spot? Did she tell you exactly where to fish?”

“No,” said Paritas, “she just said there was fish there. She had a radar-type thing on the boat that could read the water. There were supposed to be fish.”

“And were there?”

“Just that thing we caught. That I caught. Then we went back, as you know.” “To Dean’s?” “That’s right.”

Hazel turned back a couple of pages in her PNB and read her notes from the interview with Barlow. “You came in separate cars. You and Bellocque.”

Paritas narrowed her eyes at Hazel. “So?”

“Just seems odd, if you’re living together, that you came in separate cars.”

“We’re not living together, Detective Inspector. I live in Toronto. Remember? You interrupted my drive home. I have my own car.”

“Okay, okay,” Hazel said, trying to mollify the other woman. She decided to try a curveball. “So it was Barlow who drove the two of you out to that shelf. But do you think you could find it again?”

“Me?” said Paritas. “You mean on my own?”

“Yeah. Could you direct us to that spot?”

“Why?”

“Well, we never found the thing you say isn’t a body, and Barlow is too scared, so she says, to go out there again. So I thought -”

Paritas shifted in her chair, looking alarmed. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Could you find it?”

The woman, her mouth slightly open, stared at Hazel. “I probably could, but I don’t think I want to.”

“And why would that be?”

Paritas leaned forward over the table. “I didn’t see it, okay? I told you. It was Pat who insisted it was a body. And if there’s any chance it actually was, I don’t want to have to look at it, do you understand? I was a guest on that boat, there against my will to appease my… my friend. I’m not going back out on that lake to help you find some half-decomposed body. You can’t force me.”

She was scared. But Hazel could see, not in a way that was useful to her. “And you’re sure Dean didn’t somehow direct Pat Barlow to that part of the lake?”

“And then somehow ensure I fished a body off the bottom of the lake? So… what? Dean’s a killer and I’m his accomplice and he thought it’d be fun if we went out, with a witness, and just made sure one of his victims was right where we thought it was?”

“Well?”

“Am I charged with something, Detective Inspector? I’ve watched enough television to know that I’m here by choice, and that I can leave at any time, unless I’m to be charged with something.”

Hazel looked at her watch. She’d got fifteen minutes of questioning in – pretty good. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to look at something before you leave.”

“Do I have to?”

“No.”

Paritas stood and seemed to be lost in thought. “What is it?”

She followed Hazel out of the room, and they crossed behind the pen. The evidence room, such as it was, was a small chamber with a single file of metal shelves fitted against a wall. There was so little call to store anything meaningful in this room that over the years it had become a catch-all for sundry crap belonging to both the station and its personnel. There was a stack of notebooks and other paper goods on one shelf, a miscellany of police caps in different sizes still wrapped in plastic, and on a lower shelf, a roll of green felt that unfurled over a desk and became a poker table. It had been confiscated six years ago when Sergeant MacDonald broke up an illegal rake-game in a private home. Now, sometimes, it was pressed into duty at fundraisers. Or the occasional backroom game that broke out in the station house.

Hazel held the door open for Paritas, who peered into the room uncomfortably before entering it. She snapped on the overhead and gestured to the back of the room. There, now dried out but still faintly stinking, lay the mannequin on its tarp. “Recognize that?” Hazel asked.

Paritas stood over it, looking at the mannequin with an expression of blank surprise on her face. “Is this it? This is what I caught?” She turned to look at Hazel and Hazel nodded. “I thought you said you hadn’t found it?”

“We found it.”

“So Pat did take you there.”

“It was weighted down to the bottom of the lake.”

“Why?”

“So it would stay down. Or so it could be easily found.”

Paritas studied her face. “So you really do think I deliberately fished this stupid thing out of the lake? Do you have a theory why I’d want to?”

“Do you know Colin Eldwin?”

“Who?”

“Do you read the Westmuir Record?”

“The what?” Paritas was getting really exasperated now. Hazel felt the walls closing in. There was a man in a room somewhere either injured or dead and her only lead, so far, was a woman so desperate for companionship that she’d come to Westmuir County to find it. She’d even gone fishing for it. Hazel cast one more look at the strange, bereft form on the shelf and held her arm out to indicate to Paritas that she was free. She stepped out into the hallway.

“I can go?” Paritas asked.

“You can go.”

“I’ve never been questioned before,” she said. “It’s really not very pleasant.”

“It would have been worse if you’d actually done something.”

“And you’d have been able to tell? By browbeating me into contradicting myself or something?”

“Something like that,” said Hazel, leading her through the pen to the front of the station house.

“Nice to know the police have so much faith in the average citizen,” said Paritas, “that they have to trick them into telling the truth.”

“Would you trust the average citizen, Ms. Paritas?” Hazel asked her.

Paritas thought about it. “More than the police?” She smiled tightly and pushed the door open.

She was halfway to the sidewalk when Hazel asked, “What kind of name is Paritas?”

“Woman-stuck-in-traffic,” said Gil Paritas, smiling.

Hazel went back into her office, and Wingate was still there, watching the screen and absently signing reports with one hand. Hazel sighed and ran her hand through her hair. “Anything?” she asked him.

“No. Well, nothing else. I’ve got a knot in my stomach watching this guy get attacked over and over again. Although I take your earlier point – why hint at things? What do they want us to think of this?”

“We should be careful what we wish for.”

“What did you find out from Paritas?”

“She’s a tourist. She’s got no clue what it is she hooked on the lakebed. But I think she’s afraid her boy-toy might. So I have to go up and see this Bellocque guy.”

“You want company?”

“No. I’m going to go in the morning, when I have more energy. In the meantime, we have to have eyes on this screen twenty-four hours a day in case something changes.”

“She’s sure Bellocque is accounted for?”

“He’s big and bearded, so he’s not the man in the chair. Too bad we didn’t see the face of the knife-bearer.”

“That would have been accommodating of him.”

She sat heavily in the chair. “Listen, James -”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Your first week back, you deserved something easier than this.”

“It’s still not an excuse. I’m sorry I blew up at you.”

“It’s okay,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. “You should go home, Hazel.”

“Yeah. I feel a little…” A night of sleep would be a good idea, especially if any of this blew up further. “I do need to lie down. But you’ll call -”

“If anything even slightly interesting comes up.”

“You ran Claire Eldwin?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

“Well, keep on her. If hubby’s not back soon, I think we have a problem.”

He agreed, and reassured her he’d keep on top of everything. She went back out into the pen. Almost all of her officers were out on calls, dealing with citybound traffic after the long weekend. You wouldn’t know from the look of it that the station house was dealing with what seemed at least to be an abduction or perhaps a murder. She was hoping they wouldn’t have to leap into high gear, but she was ready to bet against it.

She thought she might try to walk home, but she was well past anything like a walk. PC Kraut Fraser was playing Tetris on his computer when she went past. “I seem to lack certain spatial talents,” he said.

“Can you keep a car on the road? I need a lift home.”

He seemed relieved to switch off the computer. “We’ll take the long way,” he said. “Kill some time on this holiday Monday. Time-and-a-half isn’t worth it, I’ll tell you, Skipper, not when I could be with my kids.”

“Then take the short route,” she said.

“They’re down in Toronto with their mother.” He grimaced for her. “I got all the time in the world.”

They got into his cruiser, and he backed out of the lot and started driving north along Porter Street. “You weren’t kidding about the long way.”

“Unless your back is really bad.”

“No,” she said, “it’s a nice afternoon, and I could use a drive to clear my head.”

“Any ideas on what’s going on in this mannequin case?”

“Too many for any one to be useful. You?”

“Feels like the tail’s wagging the dog a little.”

“That’s the life of the investigator, isn’t it, Kraut? You only get the tail at first and then you hang on for dear life and try to crawl up to the head.”

He took her up north of the town and then turned onto one of the smaller highways leading to one of the little lakes that fed into Gannon. This one was called Echo Lake. A banner promising fireworks dated the night before had fallen down onto one of the little beaches. Fraser turned down onto the verge and faced the water. In the distance, pleasureboaters zipped back and forth over the surface of the lake. He turned off the motor. “In a couple of hours it’ll be peaceful out here again,” he said.

“It’s peaceful now.”

“I can always handle a little more quiet.” He powered down a window. It smelled of pine and wet earth outside. It had rained heavily overnight. “So listen, I know you got a lot to think about right now, but I felt I should give you a heads-up.”

“Oh-oh. I thought this drive had an ulterior motive.”

“The new guy at OPS Central, Commander Mason’s replacement?”

“Chip Willan?”

“Yeah. Well, we all got questionnaires.”

“Questionnaires.”

He reached into an inside jacket-pocket and took out a folded sheaf of papers and handed them to her. She opened the papers up – it was a fairly detailed document with the title Ontario Police Services Central Region Work Environment Survey. The first page was mainly demographic stuff, followed by a couple of pages asking the respondent various questions about resources, clearance rates, prevalence of certain kinds of crime in their jurisdiction, job satisfaction, and so on. She said, “This is pretty standard. In fact, it’s good to know he’s sending these around. Maybe it means he’s serious about making things better.”

“Look closer. Page five.”

She turned to that page and Fraser indicated question thirty-six with his index finger. It read, “If you were redeployed to another detachment within OPSC, which one would be your first choice?”

“Goddamnit,” she said.

“It asks for our full names and badge numbers on the last page. I showed it to Martin Ryan.”

“The sneaky sons-of-bitches. What did he say?”

“He said it was illegal to ask us to put our names to an informal internal poll, and that question thirty-six was a form of union-busting and that we should ignore the whole thing. Or at least, not answer that question.”

She turned to him in the seat, which hurt, but she needed to see his face. “Who’s ‘we,’ Kraut? You mean all the PCs got this letter?”

“And the sergeants.” He looked away from her, uncomfortable. “Anyway, Ryan says the whole thing’s illegal and we don’t have to respond, but the thing is, illegal or not, it may be the only chance any of us get to have a say. If we want one. I mean, if OPSC does decide to move any of us around, and a bunch of us ignored this letter, then maybe they can say they took an informal survey and got an idea of who wanted to go where and the rest of us are going to be sent to Bumfuck. And, Skip, I want to stay in Port Dundas, but if there is no Port Dundas, I don’t want to be in Bumfuck.”

“Oh, for god’s sake. So you’re going on the record?”

“I’m thinking I have to. If I want to have any say in my future, you know? And as the detachment’s union rep, I think I have to tell the rest what I’m going to do. It wouldn’t be right otherwise.”

“Even though your regional rep tells you the letter is illegal.”

Fraser looked down at the steering wheel. “I think this Chip Willan guy is even more of a hard-on than Mason was.”

“How hard can he be with a name like ‘Chip’?”

“Listen, he’s not staring down retirement any time soon, and I think he’s going to bring it, if you know what I mean.”

“You let OPSC control you like this, Kraut, it won’t matter where they send you. And they won’t bother asking you your opinion next time.”

He turned the car on and began to back out onto the road. “I’m sorry, Skipper,” he said. “But I’m fifty next year, I got two kids in high school, and I have to speak up.”

“I’m sixty-two in less than a week. Where does all this leave me?”

Fraser stretched his neck. That wasn’t a question he could answer. “Like I say, I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”

“I do,” she said, not looking at him. “Damn it. I guess it’s time I met Chip Willan.”