Beautiful Lie the Dead (7 page)

* * *

The pathetic winter sun had barely crawled over the windowsill into her third floor apartment when Detective Sue Peters sat down at her computer. She had already showered, dressed and brewed herself a full pot of kick-ass coffee. She wanted to get a head start before Gibbsie the computer whiz showed up. He was a sweetheart, but she really didn't need him holding her hand all day, and if she blundered around in cyberspace for hours instead of skipping nimbly to the websites she needed, who the hell cared? It wasn't like the inspector was holding his breath for information. She hadn't even told him the whole story in case it turned out to be a dumb idea.

Her computer was an aging clunker that hated all the fancy new graphics and regularly crashed when she asked too much of it. The trick was to be patient, not ask it to do two things at once, let it go at its own speed, and it would get the job done. She could relate to that. She and her computer were best buds, and she resisted all Gibbsie's threats to throw it in the dump. Even the idea felt like a personal affront.

She already had a plan. She'd been awake half the night, too excited to sleep, and as she lay in the dark knowing that at least her body had to rest, she'd let her mind run loose. It still tripped up, forgot where it had been and where it was going, forgot why too sometimes. But much less now than a year ago or even a month ago. That in itself was as exciting as any case she might work on. Harvey Longstreet was going to get the full brunt of what her healing mind could do.

After coaxing her computer to load Google, she typed in his name and hit “search”. That yielded a huge bunch of garbage about a circus performer in Australia. What a dumb name for a circus performer—whatever happened to Flying Ace? She added Montreal to the search. The circus had been to Montreal, but in between the mush, she found a single link to a lawyer at McGill.

It was a posting about a student who had won the Longstreet Prize for Criminal Law. A single footnote indicated that the prize had been established in memory of Harvey Longstreet, a popular professor of Criminal Law who had died in 1978. Sue tried a few other search terms to dig up more information but to no avail. Nineteen seventy-eight was just too long ago to have much presence on the web. After surfing pointlessly for an hour, rebooting four times and drinking all three cups of coffee, even she was ready to toss the old pile of crap into the garbage. Time for Plan B. At least she had a date of death to work from.

She had recently had her driver's licence reinstated, so she headed down to the parking lot, where she stood looking in dismay at the mound of snow in her spot. Somewhere under there was her Toyota Echo. The roads were still an unpredictable mess of ice and slush. The sun was trying hard but at these temperatures, nothing was going to melt in a hurry. No point in wearing herself out shovelling before she was halfway through her day, so she left her car for Gibbsie to dig out and called a cab.

The Ottawa Public Library was only a short hop from her Centretown apartment and the cabbie wasn't pleased, but that was his problem. The library was in a contest with the police station for the ugliest building in the city. She'd heard the architectural style of both was called Brutalism, as if that was something to be proud of. Brutal it surely was, an ugly chunk of rough brown concrete squatting on the corner like a toad at a garden party. Inside, she made her way straight upstairs to the newspapers and periodicals section and approached a bored-looking library assistant picking his teeth and staring into space behind his computer.

Judging by how long the
CSI
s and
Law and Order
s had been around, everyone loved a good old-fashioned crime investigation, so Sue produced her badge and asked for his help tracking down an old lead. The toothpick was whipped out and the guy was all ears. The
Montreal Gazette
was on microfilm and he could get it in a jiff, but 1978 was a lot of papers. Any idea when in 1978?

“Bring them all. You'll have to show me how to use the machine,” she said, giving him a wink.

He sat her in the corner at one of the viewers and loaded the first tape for her. January 1978 appeared on the screen, blurry and harsh black against white. This is going to give me one mother of a headache, she thought as she turned the dial and the pages whirred past. She'd barely been a twinkle in her mother's eye back then and had no memory of life before computers. This is goddamn prehistoric. How the hell did cops do research back then?

In 1978 the economy was in shambles—what a surprise—and the politicians in the minority government were bickering— another surprise. Quebeckers were on strike, and businesses were crashing all over Montreal. The
Gazette
, which she knew was Quebec's main Anglo voice, was full of screaming headlines about the Quebec government's new language law and the repression of English rights.

Quebec sure was a lively place, she thought as she scrolled through the months. Being a small-town Ontario girl, the only politics she'd grown up with was whether the town council had been paid off when developers won their bid to pave over some prime farm land.

She was skimming so fast through the blurry print that she nearly missed the first article entirely. It was tucked into the bottom of the second page of the July 13 issue, a mere mention of an unidentified male found dead in an apartment on McTavish Street near McGill University. McGill was the word that caught her eye. There were few other details, other than to say the body had been found by the landlord after a family member expressed concern. The city was engulfed in a heat wave. The landlord was quoted as saying the man was hanging from a hook in the closet, but police refused to confirm any details.

She spun the dial forward to the next day's paper, but despite a careful search, there was no mention of the man. The following day had a small sidebar that the man had been dead for several days but that his identity was being withheld pending notification of family members. It was not until the weekend that a half-page spread on the front page of the Local News section identified the dead man. “Popular law professor's life ends in tragedy”, the headline said. There was a large photo of him in full court gown, looking into the camera like he was about to address a jury. But even the silly outfit and the prissy expression could not hide the guy's good looks. Dark curly hair, wide eyes, cheekbones and nose like a perfectly carved Greek god. He looked no more comfortable in that pointy, strangling collar than she would. He belonged at the helm of a yacht in the Caribbean. Below the photo was the caption “Maître Harvey Longstreet divided his time between McGill Law School and a select law practice involving criminal code appeals, but still found time to author several books on appellant law.”

Sue combed through the article carefully. It read like a press release from the family. Although Longstreet had apparently taken his own life in the apartment he maintained downtown close to the university, the word suicide wasn't even mentioned. According to his Uncle Cyril, Longstreet used the apartment as a retreat for rest and work during his hectic, sometimes eighteen-hour days. There was a bunch of quotes from students who adored him, from colleagues who hailed him as the next Clarence Darrow—Sue wasn't sure who that was but had a vague recollection of a famous American human rights trial lawyer—and even from an old schoolmate at Lower Canada College. She assumed Lower Canada College was like its Upper Canada equivalent, an incubator for future captains of the country.

Everyone regretted the loss of a man taken at the pinnacle of his powers, who'd left a legacy of cases untried and a young wife and infant son to mourn his loss. In all this gushing, there was precious little about the death itself. No autopsy results, no mention of nooses or closets. Montreal police were briefly quoted as saying foul play was not suspected, and the landlord who'd blabbed about the body hanging in the closet now had no comment.

Things sure were different in those days, she thought. Today the landlord would have cashed in big time, selling his story to some trashy rag that didn't give a damn about facts, integrity or family sensitivities. It was interesting to see that in 1978, Harvey Longstreet's family had enough money, or clout, to muzzle a story that might have blown the guy's perfect image to smithereens in their faces. Had the police investigated at all, or had the family's embarrassment shut them down too?

There were many questions that remained unanswered, many secrets that the family and Elena had kept to themselves. But the story seemed deader than a doornail, and Sue couldn't imagine how an old suicide, no matter how tragic, had anything to do with anything.

* * *

At ten a.m. Thursday morning, sixty-four hours and three brutal winter nights after Meredith Kennedy had last been heard from, Constable Whelan of Missing Persons finally managed to persuade his contacts at Meredith's bank to give him a peek at her records. Officially banks and phone companies required search warrants to permit police access to a citizen's records, but a warrant required proof of a crime. Being missing was not a crime, no matter what the private fears of the police were. Like all businesses, however, banks didn't want to appear uncooperative when a young woman's life might be at stake. After ten years in Missing Persons, Whelan had enough inside contacts to persuade someone to open the books.

By Thursday, things were not looking good. The city had been turned upside down by a burgeoning army of friends, family, women's groups and other concerned volunteers, and the media was dogging their every move. Medical and weather experts had been thrust on the air, counting down her diminishing chances for survival if she lay injured somewhere. The mood in the incident room had turned sombre, and the search coordinator was already talking in terms of recovery more often than rescue.

Constable Whelan refused to give up. He had been there from the first call, heard the anguish in Brandon Longstreet's voice, and seen the hopeful laughing face of the girl in the photo he'd sent. When he finally got the official okay on Thursday morning at the end of his graveyard shift, he headed directly over to the TD Canada Trust branch Meredith used. Everyone at the branch had heard of the disappearance, and everyone knew the woman well. She'd been a customer since she was six years old, when her father had brought her to open her very own account, and she still came in regularly to do business.

Recently she'd been in to discuss a small loan to cover some of the travel expenses to Ethiopia. She had a smile and a friendly hello for everyone, they said, and she was so excited about this trip. So thrilled about the wedding. She'd been engaged once before, she'd told the branch manager, but they were too incompatible. This time it had felt perfect.

The branch manager ushered Whelan directly into her office and typed some commands into her computer. “This will show a record of all her transactions in all her accounts, no matter where they occur. She can take money out of an ATM in Vancouver and it will show up here instantly.” She paused as the screen flickered and loaded a long list of entries. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she studied the list. “She has a modest RRSP but that hasn't seen any activity since last February. Tax time. Besides that, there's the unsecured line of credit and one personal bank account, a full-service chequing account that typically sees several transactions a day. She uses web banking to pay her bills. Right now this is the balance on that account.”

She paused to write the figure down for him. $11,328.32. His eyebrows shot up in surprise. So much for the global economic recession.

“The five thousand dollar loan came through,” the manager explained. “It was deposited three days ago, and it's reflected in her line-of-credit figure.”

“Can I have a printout of that entire banking summary, and also of the recent transactions in her chequing account?”

“Of course. How far back do you want?”

“The last two weeks.” He hesitated. You never knew what would be important. “Make that the last two months.”

She clicked some buttons and the printer beside her began to hum. While they waited, she studied the screen, then glanced at her calendar with a frown. “That's funny.”

“What?”

“Her last two transactions were December 14. That was Tuesday.”

The day after she disappeared, he realized, just as the manager must have. “Is there a delay in registering it in the system?”

She shook her head. “Not with debits. On weekends or after business hours, yes, but only to the next business day. Not a whole twenty-four hours later.” She plucked the printed sheets from the machine and handed them to him.

He glanced at the latest two entries. One was an ATM withdrawal for $300 and the other a payment of $176.25 at The Bay department store. Neither one would have been a preauthorized automatic withdrawal.

“Can you tell where these transactions occurred?” he asked.

“I can tell you the ATM right away.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “The TD bank on Pretoria Avenue in the Glebe.”

Whelan frowned. The Glebe was an old residential neighbourhood south of Centretown and Pretoria was a short street running along its northern edge. However, neither Pretoria nor the Glebe was anywhere near Meredith's work, her home or her fiancé's home.

“For The Bay, you will have to find out their store code through them.” The manager smiled. “But I'm sure with a little detective work you can find out not only what store she shopped at but what she bought there. It's all on computers now.”

Whelan nodded absently as he folded the printout into his growing file. His mind was already racing ahead to a better idea—the security camera at the ATM in the Glebe. As he rose to leave, she looked up at him, startled.

“Don't you want to know credit card activity too?”

He sat down with a thud, cursing his stupidity. Getting old and soft behind a desk.