Erasing Memory (7 page)

“At least she graduated in style. Anything else?”

“You were right, there was no sand on the shoes. But they found a very small smear of something silvery on the dress around hip level. That’s with Toxicology now, but they think it could be bait.”

“Bait?”

“Yes, like fish bait. The little fish you use to catch big—”

“Funny, Aziz. Yes, I get it—bait. From the seat of the boat.”

“And last of all, there’s this.” Aziz sat down and woke up her computer screen, which revealed a photograph of a flower showing leaves and a partial stem. “Valerian.”

“The stuff you use to go to sleep—if you don’t use grappa.”

“The very same, but the flutes revealed a strain of valerian stronger than anything you’d find in North America, but still not strong enough to knock her out. There was something else in there that they haven’t identified, which, it appears, acted as an agent to fuse the Champagne and the valerian into something much more potent. They think she wouldn’t have detected it because it wasn’t dissolved in the Champagne; it was in a transparent coating on both flutes. The bottle was clean.”

“Both flutes?”

“Yes.”

Aziz looked up at MacNeice to confirm that the same switches had been thrown for him as for her.

“Eastern European,” MacNeice said softly.

“All the way, in my opinion.” Aziz printed out the valerian image and took it to the whiteboard. When she’d finished taping it up, MacNeice handed her the tracing and said, “While you’re at it, you can put this up too.”

She unrolled it and looked at the sketch and then back at MacNeice.

“Ferguson drew it for me over tea. He’s more or less certain the device we’re looking for will be similar. He says he doesn’t know anyone who could do it but he does know people who might know. And keep this one close. Ferguson won’t want his involvement getting out.”

“Does he agree with the theory, though?”

“He does, which is probably why he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s involved.” MacNeice sat down on the edge of Vertesi’s desk. “Have you heard anything from Vertesi?”

“No. He was going to call after he checked the beach.”

“Last question, Aziz: Petrescu—that’s Romanian, isn’t it?”

“I believe so, but I’ll confirm that. And Property Records have promised to get us his home address within the next two hours.”

“If they do, we’ll go tonight. It’s hard to imagine Lydia Petrescu not being missed by someone.”

“They said their server was down and the technician has to come in from Toronto, but that he was on his way. I’ll let you know.”

“Romanian. Eastern European.”

“Before you go, I found out who at the Conservatory is responsible for the graduation ceremonies. Apparently there was a graduating class performance schedule with a list of invitees. I tried to call but the office is closed. It’s on my to-do list for the morning.”

V
ERTESI ARRIVED AT THE
beach house at 3:10 p.m. The patrol car and the abundance of yellow tape stretched across the driveway made it easy to find. Parking behind the cruiser, he took his digital camera and notebook from the glove compartment. As he was closing the door of the grey Chevy, he heard the power window up ahead whir down and then the familiar voice of Peter Stankovics.
“Ciao
, Vertesi.
Come sta?”

“Hey, Stinky, how’d you pull this one?”

“I’m in the shithouse for using excessive force two months ago with Danny Roberts. You remember him?”

“Yeah, mangia-cake. Always talkin’ a better game than he played.”

“The very same. He punched his old lady in the face, broke her nose. One of the kids called the cops, and I had to be the first fucker through the door.”

“I remember now. You and him had a thing for Beth Kemp, that English girl who came in our last year at Central High. You put Atom Balm in his jockstrap just before a game. What a fuckin’ great moment in sport that was.”

“And now he sucker-punches me right there on Barton Avenue. I took a lot of abuse getting him into the cruiser. I had Lucy Tomassi with me—she was ready to pop him—but the real shit began when we got to the station.”

On the seat next to Stankovics was a half-empty box of mini-doughnuts and two extra-large coffee cups, one empty and lying on his daily report binder. His radio barked to life with a flow of static, and he reached over and turned it off before continuing.

“Lucy’s opening the door to the station. I’m pulling Danny out of the car—he’s all ‘fuck you, you piece of shit’—when suddenly he spits at me. Catches me right on the cheek.” He put his meaty paw on the spot where it had happened, as if nursing a bruise. “A big phlegmy goober, right here.”

Vertesi’s face screwed up at the thought of it.

“Exactly!” said Stankovics. “So I head-butted him and split his nose wide open. Apparently I said something like, ‘You’ve always been a snotty piece of shit, Roberts, but that should help your head cold.’ Anyway, I shove him, all bloodied up, through the door, and I look up and the shift sergeant’s standing there with a slice of pizza and a Coke. He saw the whole thing.”

“Is the cake suing?”

“No. Apparently his wife gets wind of this and says to him, ‘I’ll drop the assault charge against you if you drop yours against Stinky.’ It was a classy thing to do, even if it doesn’t help her in the long run, but the sergeant put me on a three-month
rotation of shit details anyway. I got five weeks to go. Luce has been amazing, though. She’s been getting guys to swing by with doughnuts and caffeine, so I’m set.”

“What’s happening here, anything?”

“Forensics guys just left, media vans were here earlier, but other than that, nothin’.”

“Anyone been down to the beach lookin’ around?”

“Nope. We restricted the news teams to the road above. I’ve been taking my leaks in the bushes, but the whole area seems quiet. You goin’ in?”

“No, just want to see the beach.”

“Well, you came at a good time. Shit, you could strip off and take a swim with the weather up here. Been tempted to myself, but I’d probably come out and find the sergeant standin’ there with my uniform.”

“Stink, I’ll catch you later.”

V
ERTESI CLIMBED OVER THE TAPE
and walked through the breezeway to the deck. He turned to look inside the cottage; everything was just as MacNeice had described it, except of course that the girl and the Seabreeze were gone.

The call of a gull pulled his attention back to the beach and the lake. For a moment he couldn’t help imagining himself as the owner, surveying all that’s lovely about the world. Then he snapped out of it; this would never be the life he’d have. Looking to the left, he could see the leading edge of the neighbouring cottage; to the right was a dock with a small, red-hulled sailboat moored at the end. “Beautiful. Like he said, a hundred yards in either direction.”

He sat on the bottom step, untied his shoes, took his socks off and rolled up his pant legs. He folded the socks, put them
in the shoes and set them on the step. Retrieving his camera and notebook from his pocket, he took off his jacket and folded it neatly, then set it on the shoes and placed his notebook on top. Picking up a branch that had fallen from one of the birch trees, he stepped over the yellow tape and walked towards the water. The grass was cool under his feet, and the transition to warm sand made him pause for a moment, then shimmy his feet deeper into the sand.

The surface of the lake was almost still; the water lapped half-heartedly at the shore as if it had to keep up appearances. Vertesi walked slowly along the dry sand just above the waterline. He could see the bottom: a shoulder of hard sand that ran the length of the beachfront, extending a few feet into the lake before dropping off a couple of feet or more. He could see the silver slivers of minnows darting about in the deeper water. “What one thing …?” he said to himself as he looked back at the cottage nestled cosily among the trees.

He thought about the boat, about how, if you were going to land it in order to carry someone to the cottage, you’d likely choose your spot so it was more or less in line with the stairs. He walked to the point opposite the bottom of the steps. Squatting down, he peered beneath the surface. Sure enough, there was a groove in the sandbar; it had been softened by the wavelets but was still a distinct V. He drove the stick into the sand just beyond the waterline to mark the spot. He took the camera out of his pocket and framed several shots of the V, checking each time to make sure it registered. It did, but because of the glare off the surface, only faintly. He rolled his pant legs above his knees and waded into the water several feet beyond the groove. “Fucking freezing,” he muttered. With the sun at his back he framed several more shots; the V was now more apparent.

Vertesi looked down at his feet in the water, all greeny blue, the minnows racing around him. He was losing the feeling in his toes. He waded a few yards over, parallel to the shore, then came out of the water. Up and down the beach in either direction there was no sign of life, and other than a sail going by on the horizon, there was no sign of life on the water. He thought it weird, but then, considering it was a weekday in the middle of June, maybe not.

He sat on the stairs to let his feet dry and made his notes—all of his observations and random thoughts, just as MacNeice had taught him—before wiping the sand off his feet, putting his socks and shoes on and climbing the stairs. Stankovics was dozing at the wheel of the patrol car.
Too many doughnuts
, Vertesi thought to himself, as he got in the car and drove off towards the next cottage down the lake.

D
RIVING ALONG
K
ING
, which ran west parallel to Main, MacNeice thought about the statement that this killing made. In an age of bombs, assault rifles, IEDs and an endless variety of automatic pistols, who’d go to the trouble of creating a syringe and then use something as crude as battery acid to erase someone’s brain … and why? That was it, he realized. Lydia Petrescu had been erased, just like wiping out a computer’s hard drive—the shell still intact but the device empty and useless. Who was this message intended for?

He’d spent the rest of the afternoon fielding telephone calls, the first of which was from DC Wallace, wanting to know if there was anything new to report. He told him about the tentative identification of Lydia Petrescu and about her father and the weapon. Following that conversation, his phone began ringing with requests from the media for interviews. He could hear
in the reporters’ voices the familiar frenzy that always surrounded a homicide, but he reminded them that Deputy Chief Wallace was the media contact; he had no information to report beyond what they’d been given by his senior officer.

Slipping the Chevy into the spot reserved for Marcello’s father behind his old friend’s restaurant, MacNeice looked at the time on the dash—6:23 p.m. He turned off the ignition but left the switch on Auxiliary, as he needed to decompress before he ate. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out the wallet of CDs, flipping through till he found
Lush Life
. Slipping the CD into the player, he put the case back in the glove compartment; as he did so he remembered the cummings. He lifted the place-marker ribbon and opened the book to the page he knew was waiting like an old friend, or a pusher of pain—over time it had been both. He looked down and spoke the words that greeted him there: “I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.”

No one could remove Kate from him, no one could erase her. Lydia Petrescu had undoubtedly left memories with her family as well as the voice-mail message with her playing in the background, but something made his insides ache at the thought of her being erased from within in an instant. The idea that the attack had obliterated her talent—the thing that he imagined she loved doing most of all—seemed the point of her death. She was beautiful, but the killer hadn’t splashed her face with battery acid, hadn’t taken away her physical beauty. Instead he’d taken the thing that gave her life meaning, then laid her out as if the crime scene were a shoot for a fashion magazine.

Realizing how miserable he was becoming, sitting in a parking lot with Strayhorn’s phantoms playing in his ears and a
poem he knew by heart in his hands, MacNeice closed the book, put it back in the glove compartment, turned off the CD, grabbed his keys and went inside.

Marcello’s back door, available to staff, family and only a few friends, led straight into the kitchen, where his wife, Chris, was the chef. Amid the clattering of dishes and the hum of exhaust fans, the happy chatter, laughter and occasional singing, MacNeice always felt at home. Usually as he passed through, Chris would tell him what to order and remind him that if he didn’t like it, he should just send it back and she’d make something else. This last was always delivered with a smile; for the decade that Chris had been feeding him, MacNeice had never sent anything back.

As he eased onto his stool at the bar, Marcello himself, a pocket-bull of a man with a ready grin and an endless supply of jokes, wandered over, looking somewhat conspiratorial. “I’ve got something new for you,” he said. “Chamomile grappa.” Seeing MacNeice’s eyebrows rise, he added, “Trust me, it wakes you up before it puts you to sleep.” Then he cracked up, slapped MacNeice on the shoulder and turned towards the shelf for the bottle.

It was perhaps the smoothest and certainly the sweetest grappa he’d ever had. Before he could say anything his eyes had not already expressed, Marcello whispered, “I’ve got two bottles for you. Give me your keys and I’ll put them in your trunk.”

“You read my mind, March.
Grazie
. Put it on my bill.”

“You got it. Sparkling water, and I’ve got a nice Shiraz.”

“Sounds perfect.”

Before he turned away to pour the drinks, Marcello put the daily paper in front of him. MacNeice scanned the front page
without interest before pushing it aside and looking up at the television, where a hockey game was in progress.

“A rerun from last week,” Marcello said. “Tonight, though, the Leafs play Chicago. That’s always a great game.”