A Door in the River (16 page)

The black Mercedes had stopped near the trees and the taxi was driving past it a couple of car lengths. Then it stopped and discharged its fare, who got out on the left side of the cab, his back to Hazel. He stepped forward, but she already knew who he was. The man went to the side of the road and stepped down off the shoulder. She could only see him from the waist up. He was walking toward the trees. Then he vanished into them. Nothing happened. Both the cab and the Mercedes remained where they were. Then, a moment later, a man and a woman emerged from the woods. They walked calmly up to the road and got into the taxicab. The black car made a three-point turn and came back out to the Ninth Line. The taxi followed behind it. There was someone with long hair driving the Mercedes.
He was wearing a ballcap. Hazel got back into her car and drove up to the Tenth Line. She dialled Wingate’s cell.

“Where are you?”

“I’m driving west along the Tenth Line. You’re not going to believe who I just saw.”

Constable Forbes was standing at the front counter of the detachment when a man he recognized came into the station house.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?” he asked.

“I’m refreshed.”

Forbes looked at his watch. “You’ve been gone for forty-eight hours. I thought you were taking the week off.”

Wingate lifted the counter flap and walked through. “Is she back yet?”

“She is.”

“You come along, okay?”

He knocked on Hazel’s door, and entered on “Come!” and Hazel looked up. She’d been tapping on her keyboard. “I just talked to you.”

“I know. I can’t look at the water anymore. What are we doing?”

“I’m looking up an address on the MTO site.”

“Guys?” said Forbes. “Whose address?”

“I just followed one of the taxicabs, Roland, one of the cabs
you
brought to my attention. It drove into the fields above Queesik Bay and let a man out in the middle of
nowhere, beside a little grove of trees. You know how the forest pops up here and there in those fields?”

“Yes.”

“The cab let Jordie Dunn out. And Dunn walked into the trees and vanished.”

“Well, he lives in Kehoe Glenn, doesn’t he?”

She put her finger against her screen and began writing. “Right at the entrance to town.” She looked up at them.

“Should we inform Superintendent Greene?” Forbes asked.

“Do whatever you need to do,” she replied. “I’m out of here.”

“We’ll wait for news,” said Wingate. “You better go.”

Jordie Dunn lived in one of the two-storey apartment buildings at the entrance to Kehoe Glenn, cheap living quarters for locals, the Lorris Arms. After his nervous appearance at the station house, she’d asked around about him and discovered he was an irregularly employed handyman with no family. His connection to Wiest was as he’d said: he sometimes came along on a job or Wiest tossed him a little gig. She understood that his specialty was wiring and plumbing. Dunn had also declared bankruptcy in 2002. As far as she knew, he’d been living in the Lorris Arms since 1999, which was when he’d moved into the environs. She didn’t know where he’d come from, and an inquiry to the Ministry of Transport
hadn’t come up with any addresses before Kehoe Glenn.

On her way down, Wingate had called to say they would tell Greene that they were still collecting information. News about Dunn could wait another hour or two, until she’d had a chance to talk to him. Once she got Dunn back to the station house, Greene could sit in on the update. She pulled off the road that led under the gateway at Kehoe Glenn and went around the back of the Lorris Arms. She had no idea what kind of car Dunn would be driving. It was possible, if he’d made a purchase in those trees, that he was already home. She parked and walked casually to the front of the building. His name was on the directory inside the vestibule and she buzzed his apartment. There was no answer. She buzzed again and still nothing. She went back out to the front and looked across the road. There was a dingy little coffee shop with dusty-looking windows, but there were people inside and she’d be able to see the front door of the Lorris Arms, so she crossed and ordered a coffee. It was poured for her out of a carafe with coffee she was sure had been brewed the day before. It stank of rubber. She sat with it in the window and stared across the road, lifting the mug to her lips but not drinking from it.

The mug was still full an hour later, but it was cold, and Dunn had not entered his building. Her mind was travelling, gazing out over the quiet entrance to Kehoe Glenn. They had a little bit of AC in this place, but not enough
to allow her to forget how hot this August was turning out to be. You could often count on a cold front in the county in August, something that finally smoothed the edge of July. July was always hot, but now August was hot, too.

It’s your old hag body
, she said to herself,
that no longer readily ventilates itself. The summer hasn’t changed
.

But a lot of things had, actually. Driving down to the Indian reserve this week, her attention had finally been drawn to something she knew didn’t belong in the landscape, and this last time – passing it earlier – she’d really looked at it going by in her window. The town of Dublin, which you saw if you came directly into the reserve from the north, was one of the county’s prettiest little hamlets, and she hadn’t paid attention to the sign because the first time she’d passed it, she’d thought it was a billboard.

But it wasn’t. It was news. Some comfy housing corporation was about to dump a ready-made suburb here, right outside of Dublin, if not right on its edge. The sign, she had now confirmed, made the town itself sound like a selling point, it was “unspoiled country rustic.” Dublin was also going to be lucky enough to share itself with not just Tournament Acres, as this monstrosity proposed calling itself, but the golf course that would also be built here. Which, as luck would have it, would have its own hotel. On the grounds of the hotel would be the world’s biggest outdoor wave pool.

Why not an atom smasher for the old folks? It was
disgusting to think of, here, off the main highway – protected, you’d have thought – from these marauding people who wanted to live in Disneylands for their money to play in. It was
forty
minutes from Port Dundas, and Port Dundas had a
waterfall
. It made her throat tighten to think of it. The cutline at the bottom of the sign had read, “It’s always your turn in Tournament Acres.”

So they were going to gobble up Dublin. The summers were getting hotter and the small towns of Westmuir County were now officially bait for cityfolk.

She was staring at Jordie Dunn as the word
bait
drifted through her mind. He was walking up the front steps of the Lorris Arms. She stood so suddenly she almost spilled the cold coffee. He was inside now. She waited two minutes and then she crossed the road stiffly, unconsciously keeping her arms from swinging as she did, as if displacing that much air could warn him of her intent.

She got into the little, locked foyer, just as a woman was coming out of the stairway. Hazel waited for her to open the door and she simply slipped inside and went down the hall to 1F, Dunn’s apartment, and knocked. There were sounds from within: a chair scraping back, followed by silence. Second thoughts. Who did he think was at the door? She called through, identifying herself, and when more silence came, she announced she knew he was inside. Then the door opened and he was standing there, looking sheepish.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Jordie. Can I come in?”

“I was just about to –” he said, but she put her fingertips on his door and pushed it open.

“Thanks,” she said.

She stepped him backwards and he retreated into the musty apartment. Little particles of dust were catching light in the few shafts of illumination that pierced the gloom. She walked in slowly, watching Dunn’s eyes and breaking her gaze long enough to look to her left and right. She stood a few feet in front of the still-open door, aware that her fingertips were tingling.

“How’re you doing, Jordie?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“You just getting in from church?”

“From?”

“Never mind. Why don’t you pour us a couple glasses of water, Jordie, and you can tell me the price of soybeans.”

He looked behind her to the hallway, still exposed in the open door, and she closed it. His kitchen was as dark as the rest of the apartment, although the sink and the countertop were spotless, as if he never ate there. It seemed a distinct possibility: she couldn’t imagine Jordie Dunn so much as boiling an egg.

He opened a cupboard and took out a waterglass. There were three inside, and a couple of plates. The spigot coughed to life and spat out little gobs of water. He passed the glass to her and she left it on the tabletop untouched.
He remained by the sink. “Not thirsty?”

“No,” he said.

He watched her sit at his kitchen table and she marked the effort it was taking him to remain still. “Jordie, why did you want to know if Henry Wiest had been murdered?”

“It was eleven o’clock at night.”

“And at the edge of a wooded area. Would that be strange?”

“Depends.”

“You’re not afraid of insect bites, are you, Mr. Dunn?”

He seemed to slip through the air to the kitchen table, where he silently pulled out a chair and sat in it. “Take me in,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I intend to.”

“Now. Take me in now.”

“What’s in those fields, Jordie? What’s in that grove of trees?”

He pushed his seat back and asked her if she was done with her glass. She handed it to him and he poured the water she hadn’t touched into the sink. There was a hurried shape to all his actions, like there was a countdown running only he could hear. “Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed his jacket off a hook on the wall and held the door open for her. He went out the back door of the building and she led him around to the front, where she’d parked her car. “Sit in the passenger seat,” she said, opening the door for him and standing aside. He put his hand on the
top of the door and a warm ribbon of liquid lashed against her blouse and her neck right before she heard the shot. The weight of his body knocked the door forward and pushed her to the ground. She went low, squaring herself behind the door, and listened to Dunn slide down on the other side. She could only see his legs below the door; he was braced against its inside, hacking blood onto the asphalt. His knees shook violently.

“Give me something, Jordie!” she hissed. “What’s going on in that field?”

“He was trying to help her,” he rasped, and she heard the back of his skull slap against the inside of the door.

] 20 [

Two hours passed before she was cleared to leave the Lorris Arms. She watched Spere’s team work on the car and the body, and, in Dunn’s apartment, she answered Ray Greene’s questions. She told him who Dunn was, about his earlier visit to the station house, his status as a person of only a little interest before she saw him in that grove off of the Ninth Line. Greene was writing it all down. “Twenty-four hours I’ve been on the job, Hazel. Twenty-four hours, and I’m writing your name in a book.”

“Willan must be drinking bubbly. Am I directing traffic in Telegraph Heights until the end of time now?”

“Because you got shot at in the line of duty? He’s not that malicious.” Unawares, he was sitting in the same chair she’d been in three minutes before Dunn’s death. She remained standing. “I have three bodies now, Hazel. That’s all the commissioner knows. For now. But the rest
of this happens under me. And if there’s a single deviation from the line of command, I’ll end your career. You might work this case brilliantly, Hazel, but if there’s a single rogue element in it beyond this point, you’re done. I’ll put you up for dismissal.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

“You
actually
think I’d be rejoicing right now if your career had just ended the way Jordie Dunn’s did? We used to be friends, Hazel. I’ve never once wanted something bad to happen to you. But I’m running a police department now and our friendship, whatever it is or was, has no bearing on anything. Because now you work for me; your well-being is my beat. I have to protect you. From the risks you face on the job. From Willan. And from yourself.”

She stared at him for a three-count. Then she said, “We have to get my mother and Cathy Wiest out of my house.”

“They’ve already been picked up. After that?”

“We go where Dunn went this morning.”

“Can you do this without getting yourself or anyone else killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe this’ll help you get started.” He held his fist out. There was something in his hand: a little ziplock bag. He dropped it into her palm. “It was in one of Dunn’s pockets.”

She held it up. There was a green, twenty-five-dollar casino chip in the bag. It had the image of a little bird on it, and the word
SPARROW’S
.

“Does it mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she replied. “Was there anything else?”

“Just his keys and his wallet. Fifteen dollars, a driver’s licence belonging to a man named Caleb Merton, and two credit cards.”

“Who’s Caleb Merton?”

“I have no idea. But the ID had Dunn’s picture on it. It looks legit, but it must be fake. Unless it’s his real name.”

Bail drove Hazel back to the station house. Her mother and Cathy Wiest were already there. Her mother looked displeased, but her expression melted when she saw Jordie Dunn’s blood all over Hazel’s pants. She was wearing a patrolman’s jacket over a borrowed shirt now – forensics had taken her blouse as evidence – but she was still in her own pants. The SOCO’s best guess put the shooter on the rooftop of the building across from the apartments. The shot came from four to six hundred metres away. No one had seen anyone mount the roof, nor had anyone been seen coming down from it. Someone with confidence and a rifle had gotten in and out without being detected. There were two shells on the gravel roof: one for each of the two shots. Hazel had the casings in an evidence bag, and after making sure her mother and Cathy were being looked after, she tossed the bag to Wingate.