Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (190 page)

She shrugged. “Any crowd that thinks they’re cool. But the jocks are the worst, because the guys are all into muscles and power, and who’s bigger, faster and stronger than the next guy. The more girls you have hanging off you, the bigger you are.”

“And what’s in it for the girl? Good old-fashioned status?”

She raised her head to contemplate him thoughtfully. “Good old-fashioned power. Do you know how it feels to have a guy— the hottest guy in town, the biggest man on the hockey rink, the guy in all the headlines—do you know how it feels to have him in the palm of your hand? Begging, promising you anything you ask?”

“That doesn’t last, however. Five minutes later, he probably doesn’t give the girl another thought.”

“He does if she knows how to play it. But that doesn’t matter. The thrill is in catching him and having him under your spell. Hearing those words so you can repeat them over and over.”

“But guys will say anything when they’re aroused.”

“That just adds to the thrill. To get a guy to say anything, to know that this big guy can outscore anyone on the team or outrace anyone on the field, but right now all he wants and all he’s thinking about, is you.”

“But it’s not you. He’s just using you.”

“Who’s using who? Who’s in control, Mike?” She locked his gaze. “I used to be like that, when I was about thirteen, and I discovered no matter what else the kids thought of me or said about me, I could get the hottest guy to pay attention to me by giving hand jobs. Sometimes even in the school cafeteria under the table, but that wasn’t very satisfying because you couldn’t have their full attention. The woods behind Mom’s house were better.”

He sat in silence, wrestling with dismay and discomfort as he tried to absorb this unwelcome image. He remembered being a teenage boy, and the girls who offered their bodies for free. They’d been disdained and ridiculed, even as their offers were accepted with thrills of delight. In his job, he’d met sexually abused girls who offered sex as a kind of welcoming gift, the only way they knew to please a man. He’d met prostitutes who regarded it as little more than a business deal. But the notion that teenage girls as young as thirteen enjoyed the power and the sense of dominance was unnerving.

While he was working out how to respond, Hannah herself retreated to safer ground. She picked up the crystal. “Girls like this are deep into this sex game. They set their sights on the top guy in the crowd, offer it for free, look for chances. The party scene is the best place, because the guys are on the make too, and everybody’s dancing hot and heavy, hopped up on booze and drugs. Even on just weed, a blow job is pure gold.” She laughed. “So the guys say.”

“So drugs are part of the game for these girls? Using it, maybe even supplying it?”

“Just for fun. Hypothetically, like I told you before, just to help out friends or to add to the party. They’re not serious users.”

“So where would a girl like this, hypothetically, get these drugs from?”

Hannah hesitated, taking time to lick all the salsa off her fingers. “Drugs are everywhere. But at those parties, sometimes adults have their own agendas. Their own reasons for wanting to see kids drunk or stoned or having a good time.”

“What reasons?”

“I don’t know, Mike. That’s all I heard. I’ve never been to one of those parties. Like I said, it’s not my scene. But nobody opens up a candy store for nothing.”

Sixteen

 G
reen’s bedside phone blasted him awake at six o’clock the next morning. Barbara Devine’s voice over the line was almost as shrill. “Have you seen today’s
Sun
?” Green squinted outside at the steel grey dawn. The stars were nowhere to be seen. Had the woman lost her mind? “There’s a full page close-up of the Bruce Pit crime scene—you can even see the poor woman’s naked foot, for God’s sake—and the headline is the usual Frank Corelli sensationalism. ‘Did school social worker know too much?’ Mike, what did you tell the guy?”

Green bolted upright, instantly clear-headed. Goddamn Corelli. Anything to sell a damn paper. “What’s in the body of the article?”

“Well, that doesn’t matter, does it? People don’t read the fine print, the part where he admits the body hasn’t been identified and the police are denying a connection between the two deaths. Corelli’s got the story the police aren’t telling yet.”

“Does it name the social worker?”

There was silence as Devine scanned the article. Green pictured her sitting at her kitchen table, still dishevelled from sleep and surrounded by the three local papers she scanned every morning. “No, fortunately not,” she said, several decibels lower.

Green breathed a sigh of relief. It was a small reprieve, since Jenna Zukowski’s family and friends would know only too well who Corelli was referring to. Moreover, the killer would know that his attempt to conceal her identity and her connection to the Kovacev case had not worked, making him all the more dangerous and desperate.

But at least Jenna Zukowski’s name had not been broadcast across the entire city.

“I want you down at the station
ASAP
, issuing a clarification, Mike. And you can tell Corelli that his boss will be hearing from me!”

That will make his day, Green thought. The boys in the
Sun
newsroom were probably laying bets on how long it would take the police brass to lodge their complaint. Controversy and conflict sold papers.

“Oh, and Mike!” Devine snapped just as he was about to hang up. “Let’s get an
ID
on this woman so we can put all this speculation to rest.”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” Green muttered once he’d hung up. Thanks to his early wake-up call, he arrived at the station to find the Major Crimes Squad room still virtually empty. None of the day shift had clocked in yet, and predictably Corelli was nowhere to be found in the
Sun
newsroom. Green used the time to do damage control by issuing a press release and contacting media relations to handle the fallout. Then he called Jenna Zukowski’s parents, who, along with half the town of Barry’s Bay, had taken over the entire Super 8 Motel in Kanata, but who fortunately had not seen the
Sun
. He reassured them they’d be the first to know of any developments.

Finally he checked in on the surveillance team sitting down the street from Darren O’Shaughnessy’s house. LeBlanc sounded groggy but pulled himself together quickly at the sound of Green’s voice. No sir, there’d been no activity at the O’Shaughnessy house yet, except an
Ottawa Sun
delivery man around four in the morning. The uncle’s van was still in the drive, and the kid had parked his sports car in the garage the night before. In the background, Green heard Watts volunteering that he would too, if he had a set of wheels like that.

Outside Green’s office, the squad room had begun to fill up, and he spotted Sullivan coming down the hall from the briefing room. Quickly he told LeBlanc to record everyone who came and went from the house, and if Riley O’Shaughnessy left, they were to call it in and follow him.

Sullivan’s bulk filled the doorway, and when Green hung up, he stepped inside and closed the door. A frown carved deeply into his brow. “Fucking Corelli,” he said, dropping into the guest chair, which screeched beneath his two hundred and fifty pounds.

Green nodded grimly. “I’ve tried to put out fires, but the sooner we can
ID
this Jane Doe, the better. When can MacPhail give us something definite to go on?”

“He’s doing the autopsy this morning, but the formal
ID
is going to be tricky. With no teeth for dental records, it’ll be down to fingerprints and
DNA
. Paquette is going to try to lift the skin from the fingers today, but it’s iffy. It’ll take a couple of days.”

“But there must be some clues—medical records, blood type, height and weight...”

“Yeah, but even that will still take a day or two.”

“What about time of death? Can he at least tell us that? We >know Jenna’s been missing since Friday, so...”

“Yeah. Lots of time to breed flies and maggots, so we shipped the little buggers off to Dr. Narwa. At least we should have some answers on that by the end of the day.”

Green had to smile. Dr. Narwa was a wild-eyed entomologist with an unusual enthusiasm for his subject that sent all but his most devoted colleagues fleeing from the room. He would spend all day and night with his magnifying glass, microscope and calculator identifying the species, stage and generation of every bug found in Jane Doe’s body.

“But at this point Jenna Zukowski is our best working assumption,” Green said. “I mean, we don’t have any other likely candidates.”

Sullivan shook his head and was about to reply when his cell phone interrupted him. After glancing at the Caller
ID
, he switched it to speaker phone. “What’s up, Bob?”

Gibbs’ tinny voice filled the room. “I’m still trying to find Crystal Adams, sir. I haven’t had much luck, but I did find out something interesting I thought you’d want to know. I spent most of yesterday afternoon at her high school, tracking down her friends. None of them have seen her since school on Friday. They said she was in a weird mood—”

“Weird how?” Green interjected.

“Oh!” Gibbs sounded startled to hear Green’s voice. “Um... uptight. She was s-supposed to meet them Sunday afternoon at the mall, but she never showed.”

“Were they worried? Was that unusual?”

“Not worried, sir. More pissed off. She does this, they said. Ditches her friends when something better comes along.”

“What would be something better, according to them?”

“Well, it looks like she’s a serious puck bunny, sir.”

Green raised a questioning eyebrow at Sullivan. “Hockey groupie,” Sullivan explained. “Passed from player to player.”

“Yessir,” Gibbs said. “So I tracked down some members of the Ottawa 67’s who are still in town, but they haven’t seen her.”

“Was she seeing anyone in particular?” Green asked.

“Half the team, it sounds like, but some of the guys said she had her sights set on Riley O’Shaughnessy.”

Why wouldn’t she, Green thought. Hannah had said these girls liked to shoot for the top. The ultimate power trip. And if that pesky girlfriend was out of the way...

The idea came out of the blue, so obvious that he wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. If Crystal had supplied the drugs, she herself was in the best position to doctor them. Getting rid of the girlfriend would give her a clear run at the boy. The only trick was how to keep the boy from taking the bad drugs too.

“Did you talk to Riley O’Shaughnessy himself?” Sullivan was asking.

“N-no, sir. I knew you were working that aspect of the case, and I didn’t want to interfere. But this is the thing. I did learn one other thing that might be important. Crystal Adams had an appointment with Jenna Zukowski the day after Lea’s death. The secretary in the guidance department remembers her running out of Jenna’s office.”

Green almost shouted aloud. The pieces were falling into place. It was a safe bet Crystal had told Jenna something about Lea, and rather than report the information to the police, the misguided fool had decided to make inquiries on her own. Did she think she was helping Crystal? Or Lea? Or the killer? “Great work, Bob!” Green exclaimed. “Did any of her friends know what they talked about?”

“No sir, but...I didn’t ask.” Gibbs’ voice fell. “That Norman Bethune School is my next lead. I was planning to go there after... Is that..? D-do you want...?”

Sullivan rescued him. “Go ahead, Bob. We need to find that girl.”

Green’s mind was racing as the disparate bits of information began to fit together. Gradually an appalling alternative emerged. Crystal Adams had confided something to Jenna, then Jenna had disappeared. And now, so had Crystal.

Two missing women...

He was so distracted, he barely heard Sullivan’s question. The big detective had signed off and was looking at him. “That is okay, isn’t it, Mike? I know Bethune is Hannah’s school.”

Green nodded. “What if it’s Crystal Adams?”

“What is?”

“Our Jane Doe.”

To his credit, Sullivan digested the idea carefully. “The body’d been in the woods at least a couple of days. When was Crystal last seen?”

“Her mother said she took off early Sunday morning.” Sunday morning! A knot of nausea gripped Green’s gut. “Jesus Christ. If it is Crystal, this is my fault.”

Sullivan stared at him. “How do you figure that?”

“The timing of it. She took off Sunday morning.”

“So?”

“Lea died last Monday night, and all week Crystal attended school as normal. She didn’t take off. Sure, she was upset, probably from a guilty conscience because she’s the one who supplied the drugs. She’d wanted Riley for herself, but I don’t think she’d thought through her actions, so when Lea dies, she felt bad—”

“Not bad enough to miss school. Not bad enough that her mother noticed.”

Green snorted. “From what Gibbs said, I don’t think that mother would notice trouble unless it was happening to
her.
But the point is, Crystal did feel bad enough to go to the social worker for advice, but whatever advice she got, she didn’t like it, because she stormed out of the guidance office. But she didn’t drop out of sight. She goes on with things, even makes plans with friends. Then suddenly, Sunday morning, she freaks out. What happened Sunday morning?”

“I don’t know, Mike. Maybe Riley O’Shaughnessy rejected her, maybe she learned about the social worker’s disappearance and thought it was her fault.”

Green whipped his head back and forth. “Could be. But there was one thing that happened Sunday morning that very clearly would have freaked her out. Something that was intended to shake the case up. I guess it did.”

“Riddles, Mike?”

“The
Ottawa Sun
article. The one I fed Frank Corelli about bad drugs being the real cause of Lea’s death. The
Ottawa Sun
hits the stands about six a.m. in the morning. I remember Gibbs told me right after she got a phone call, she went out to get a paper. I’d bet a million dollars that wasn’t a usual Sunday morning routine for her.”