A Door in the River (31 page)

“Where is this heading, Commissioner? What’s it about?”

He stood up, and she remained where she was. She’d save standing up for when it would have the most effect. He said, “What it is
not
about, Inspector Micallef, is just you.”

“I know that.”

“What happens if this girl kills again?”

“She’s finished. She got everyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How. How can you be sure?” he asked. His tone had become ever so slightly heated and it was frankly disconcerting.

“If you had investigated this case, Commissioner Willan, you would have drawn the same conclusion.”

Silence.

“Am I fired?”

“What about future charges?”

“What future charges?”

“How many warrants were issued? Who was notified
that a covert investigation out of our jurisdiction was being undertaken?”

“This was too serious to announce our intentions!”

“It was,” he said. “I agree.”

“We acted with the best information we had.”

“You’re right. I’m here to say you did a good job.”

“What?”

“Even though there
is
the matter of whether the man who shot Lydia Bellecourt also beat the crap out of her from inside his car, twenty feet away.”

She’d gotten to the point where it felt unwise to speak at all.

“Any of this could be a problem at some point, Hazel. If you need to be covered, I’ll cover you. And if there’s anything I don’t already know, I need to know it.”

He offered his hand. She screwed up her eyes and looked at Greene. He chucked his chin toward Willan.
Shake the man’s bloody hand
. She shook. Tentatively. He pumped.

“Thank you, Commissioner,” said Ray Greene because she hadn’t.

“Yes, thank you,” said Hazel.

“Do it again, though,” he said to both of them, “and it won’t be difficult to fire either of you. Or suspend you without pay, definitely or indefinitely, retire you, reassign you to deskwork, send you on a teaching mission to Kapuskasing. My options are actually almost endless. Superintendent?” Greene stood. “You’re her boss now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Inspector?” Hazel tightened her chest. “Ray Greene is your boss. Everything you do from now on is hand-stamped, green-lighted, and approved, and not just in principle, by Superintendent Greene. Is that unambiguous enough for you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when James Wingate gets out of hospital, we’ll have a party for him and give him a commendation in front of the whole town.
When
he gets out.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and this time, when he offered his hand, she took it.

He left them together in the office. Greene sat.

“That was interesting,” he said.

She couldn’t think of what to say. “I better get started on my reports.”

“Good,” he said.

“Is Cathy still at – ”

“She went home last night. Are you going to see her?”

“Maybe. Not right away, though. I don’t know what to –”

He was writing something. She strained to see what it was. He was making figure eights with the tip of his pen.

“Can I go?”

“I’ll be at the hospital this afternoon.”

“I’ll see you there then.”

That was the extent of it for now.

______

After trying to write her report, Hazel went back to the house in Pember Lake. It was mid-afternoon. There were a lot of loose ends now; matters she’d left unattended. There were some plates in the sink and she washed them. She flashed on her memory of Cathy standing at her own sink, washing her entire house with that look in her eye. She thought she knew now what Cathy had been feeling. Like the world was floating away. She noticed her mother’s pill organizer still had its morning doses in it. Emily was upstairs taking a nap. A little wave of anger suddenly went through her.

She took a glass of water and the pills up the stairs, with a plate of Coffee Breaks, and went into her mother’s room. She was asleep with her face turned to the wall. The covers were pulled up to her ears and the sheet barely moved with her breathing. Hazel turned on the bedside lamp, but the sudden little flood of light had no effect on her mother’s wakefulness. A jolt of fear went through her and Hazel reached out and touched her mother’s shoulder and shook her lightly. The shoulder was warm, and her mother shuddered beneath her touch and said something, and Hazel shook her a little more.

“It’s okay. It’s just me. Can you sit up?”

Her mother inhaled deeply through her nostrils and sat up, blinking and confused. “What time is it?”

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m sorry I woke you. You forgot to take your pills.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” her mother said, fully awake now. “I’m not going to die in my sleep for lack of pills.”

“You don’t know that. Now sit up and take them.” Emily pushed herself up farther in the bed and held out her hand angrily for the medications. Hazel lay them in her cool, leathery, white palm. “I know you’re not pleased with this situation, but this is the way things are. Take these pills, and take all your pills, and eat food, and stop acting like you have a date with the Grim Reaper. You never gave up a fight in your life, Mother, and you’re not starting now.” Her mother swallowed the pills without the water and then held her hand out for the glass because they wouldn’t go down. “Jesus Christ,” Hazel said.

“Am I allowed to go back to sleep?”

“Not yet.”

Her mother blinked slowly and Hazel told her what had happened in the last few days. Wingate’s injuries. The reappearance of Ray Greene. Willan laying down the law. Her long reign as interim CO was over. Emily had been summarily turfed in her fourth term as mayor, by a blinkered town council. Worse than what Hazel was going through now, but it was a commonality, and Hazel had lately been having the instinct to seek out as much connection with her mother as possible. And she’d appreciate her daughter turning to her …

“Well, now we can both curl up and die,” her mother
said. “You want me to move over?” Hazel laughed. “What’re you chuckling at?”

“I thought maybe you’d pat my head and tell me everything’s going to be okay.”

“I’ve never told you everything was going to be okay. In fact, if I recall, I’ve spent most of my life warning you that things go to pieces as a matter of routine. How come you haven’t learned that yet?”

“I know it in my work life. I just thought …”

“You thought that if you could convince me I still have work to do as your mother, I wouldn’t die yet?”

Hazel’s smile faltered. “Well, when you put it like that …”

“I’ll take my medicine, Hazel,” her mother said. “If you’ll promise not to make both our lives impossible when it’s time to make important decisions.”

“Gary says you can live with myeloma for years.”

“But not forever.”

“No,” said Hazel. Emily swivelled her body on the mattress and slipped her frail feet out. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to the hospital.”

“You don’t have to take me
that
seriously.”

“No, dummy, I want to see James. Get me my grey slacks and something warm.”

“Oh …”

“Your timing stinks, though. I was just skiing with your father in New York.”

“Really.”

“Ellicotteville, 1941. Two years before you were born.”

“Simpler times.”

Hazel got her mother’s clothes out and told her she’d make some tea and then they’d go. But for herself, she didn’t want any tea. She went back down the stairs and got a half-full bottle of J&B out of the cupboard and sat in the rocking chair with it. She listened to her mother in the bathroom and she took one good glug out of the bottle and then another. Then she put the cap back on and put the bottle away. She filled the kettle for her mother and then went back out into the living room to wait. The Weather Channel was on silently – her mother only muted it when she napped, but she couldn’t be bothered to turn it off. Looking at the weather was perhaps a sign that the old bint was planning on continuing with life, pointlessness and all. Hazel stared at the screen. Weather systems were soundlessly pouring sideways across the province, forming and reforming like fog. Rain was coming from the Soo, but it was two days distant.

Her mother was taking the stairs slowly. “Every system in this body is shorting out but my hearing,” she said. “And there’s no mistaking the crack of the cap on a whiskey bottle.”

Hazel turned the kettle off.

] 38 [

Wednesday, August 17, afternoon

Over the Tuesday and into the Wednesday, as Katrina Volkov began to recover from her ordeal, the heartbreaking and sickening details of the case began to come to light. Volkov knew of a total of five girls, but the cramped history of the place suggested the operation had begun three years earlier. The story came down as oral tradition – from the girls who had once been there to the ones who were still alive. Two women Volkov had personally known had died before Kitty’s escape, and she had thought Kitty was dead as well. Now she was the only witness to a crime so horrifying that media from as far away as Miami were waiting in the parking lot of Mayfair General, hoping to get a word with somebody, anybody. Deliverymen were being handed wads of cash. LeJeune had dispatched every
free body she had to the hospital on the Friday morning and her uniforms took up positions every thirty metres around Mayfair General.

Friday afternoon, a Russian-speaking officer was bussed up from Toronto, in case he was needed. But Katrina’s English was good: she put her captivity at seven months. She’d been there long enough to learn English.

They connected her to her husband in Elizavetgrad.

“She is saying she was not in school,” said the interpreter.

They left her alone, and let her rest. They had as clear a picture of what had happened under that little grove of trees as they would ever get. The last piece of information Hazel had really wanted had come out as well: Volkov had given Larysa’s last name as Kirilenko.

The OPS and the QBPS had each sent a forensic team into those underground rooms on Wednesday afternoon. The two forces worked together. They’d found a basement that had been lowered and enlarged, like a giant tomb. There was a body there; later it was determined that this was the Ronald Plaskett that Wingate had earlier identified. He’d been shot dead. A long white wall with four doors in it ran against the longest wall. Each door had opened on a tiny eight-by-four “room,” with a dirt floor and at least one dirt wall, the one at their backs. Most of the chambers had a foam mattress and a blanket or two. The heavy door still stood in the north wall of the crushed room beyond it.

Volkov’s stories filled the space with suffering bodies and whispering voices. The rooms had been freezing cold, even in the summer, and they discovered that it was warmer sleeping on the dirt itself, especially if you could loosen it up a bit. You could also loosen the dirt in the back walls and there were sometimes bits of sharp rock that were good for digging with. But at this depth underground, digging through the dirt with a little stone was like trying to scrape a hole in the sidewalk with your fingernail. “We make a broken telephone, you know? Before I am taken away from my home, in that place, the girls before us make a system for talking. They have make small holes in the dirt at the end of the wall, where the wall touches. Always, you make these holes filled with dirt, but every week, same time in the middle of the night, anyone who want to talk, digs open the hole.

“And then we say short things. We learn names. When a new girl comes, someone shows how to use telephone.” She said something in Russian, and Lenkov translated it.

“ ‘This is how we got to know our neighbours.’ ”

“
Neighbours
,” said Volkov. “Yes, our neighbours in hell. This is how we know our names, where we are from, what we did there, how it happens to us that we are bring to this place. That men rent us for a week.”

“Did Larysa ever talk?”

“She was there shortest. But she
is
alive?”

“James told you that?”

“Yes.”

“You got to know him a little.”

“I only see him twice, but yes, I know him now. He is also …?”

“He’s alive. He was badly injured when the roof of that room fell in.”

“Where is Larysa?”

“I don’t know. But she’s alive. I know she’s alive.” Volkov went into herself, her eyes tracked down. “It must have been just as hard to choose to go on,” Hazel said.

“I wanted to live to thank …” she broke off and put her forehead in her hands. Then, a moment later, composed: “And to know about Bochko …”

“Bochko?”

“Big boss.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Yes. Big man with muscle.”

That was him. “His name was Lee Travers,” Hazel said. “He’s dead now.”

“Good.”

“Larysa … Kitty … killed him.”

Katrina didn’t say anything. After a moment, she withdrew her hand from Hazel’s and used it to press the button that lowered her bed. Her eyes were closing even as it went down. But a very faint smile played on her lips.

Hazel left the room and started for the ICU, where James was still under heavy sedation. She and Emily had
come the day before and sat with Michael in James’s curtained nook full of machines. In the intervening twenty-four hours, part of the investigation had begun to focus on who Travers
was
, and already details were coming in. They traced him back to Michigan and discovered that it had been true that he’d taken casino management at U of M. But his picture, and not his name, had confirmed this for them. He’d taken his degree under the name Judson Carmichael, and he’d matriculated in
1994
. He’d worked in other casinos. Each employment lasted fewer than four and a half years. Some were less than a year. They had only just started to disseminate the details of their case to other agencies when the phones began to ring. In Perrysville, Maryland, Carmichael had gone by the name Harvey Kellog. He’d been an assistant manager in the casino there, and his
boyfriend
had met with a suspicious end. Kellog had left the state, and six months later, a man seeding his field had found a pile of partially burnt women’s clothing. That had led to a terrible discovery in a derelict barn. That was after just one day of spreading the information. They dreaded what else would come up. Ten years was a long time to be a freewheeling psychopath.