Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (201 page)

Watching from the video room, Sullivan groaned. “Ted,” he muttered to himself, “you don’t want to say that till you’ve talked to your lawyer again.”

Green glanced at him questioningly, but Sullivan didn’t meet his eye.

Gibbs’s voice came through the speakers. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Ted seemed caught up in his own memories. “This is my fault. From the very beginning. Not noticing the signs, what the guy was really like. Riley’s coach tried to warn me, but being down in Gan, with him being up here... But that’s no excuse.” He clenched his large fists on the table and thrust himself back in the chair, as if to retreat from the truth. “My wife tried to warn me too, but I kept pushing it. I pushed my son right into the asshole’s clutches.”

No one in the video room dared move. Green leaned forward intently. “Let him run,” he breathed into the earphone. “Wait him out.”

Gibbs didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Ted bowed his head and pressed his fingers to his temples.

“This past week has been sheer hell. I love my son, and I’d do anything for him, but I could tell he’d been on edge, even before his girlfriend died. Like he was wired. Temper flare-ups, refusing to follow his training. I thought it was the pressure, but it was the fucking drugs McIntyre had been slipping him. So when his girlfriend turned up dead, thrown in the river, I thought Riley did it.” He pressed his eyes shut, his chin quivering. “God help me, I didn’t trust my own son.”

Sullivan slapped the video room wall, sending a shock wave through the tiny room. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! That’s the missing motive! That’s the father I can understand.”

Green hushed him sharply. He was watching Ted. Watching the proud, defiant man disintegrate before their eyes.

“Tell me about Jenna Zukowski,” Gibbs said quietly. Unprompted. Good boy, thought Green. Subtle, supportive, a rock solid delivery. Not a single stutter.

O’Shaughnessy wagged his head slowly back and forth. Began to weep. “Knowing what I do now—that Riley didn’t do it, that he called that fucking snake for advice—I’d give anything to have that moment back. To take back that punch. She was demanding to see Riley to ask him about his relationship with Lea. I panicked. One punch. That’s all it was.” He flexed his fist and stared at it through streaming eyes, as if it were an alien affront. “It sent her flying back against the fireplace. Everyone was out of the house, and once I realized I’d killed her, I knew I had to get rid of the body. Cutting her up, hiding her in garbage bags in the back of my truck, waiting till dark... That was the longest wait of my life. And then having to go back in the morning, to make sure I hadn’t left any traces. I just kept thinking, I have to get rid of all the evidence, I have to erase that this happened.” He dragged a deep, sobbing breath into his lungs. “God, if I only could.”

An hour later, Gibbs emerged from the interview room with the entire confession neatly on disk. For the first time in weeks, he wore a broad smile, but he was reluctant to hang around for congratulations.

“I want to go see Sue, tell her the good news. Keeping up with the cases...” He flushed and gave a shy smile. “It kind of makes her day.”

Green knew there was no rebuke in his words, but he felt the sting anyway. It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell Gibbs to say hello to her for him, but he stopped himself. That was not something that could be done by proxy any longer.

Gradually, the squad room emptied as detectives headed off shift for a celebratory drink together. Green spotted Sullivan shrugging on his coat and shoving his keys in his pocket, ready to head out alone. At the end of the session, he had not joined in the general cheer, but had left the video room without a word and had busied himself with follow-up notes.

Green stopped him with a firm hand on his arm. “We need to talk.”

Sullivan ran his broad hand through his hair, making it stand in erratic spikes. “Mike, can it wait till tomorrow? I’m bushed.”

“Let’s go grab a quick beer by ourselves at the Mayflower. My tab.”

The Mayflower Pub had been a fixture on Elgin Street for decades, long before trendier pubs and restaurants had gentrified the neighbourhood. A noisy cluster of patrons ringed the bar watching a baseball game, but the two detectives found a quiet booth at the rear and ordered draughts. Green waited while Sullivan took a deep slug of Kilkenny. The big detective had been avoiding his eyes, but now he looked him square on.

“Okay, Mike. What’s on your mind?”

“You should have shot him when we got to the doorway. It turned out okay, but that rifle could have killed any one of us if it had gone off. Not to mention I could have shot you myself. If the brass ever found out...”

Sullivan’s eyes probed his. “They’re not going to hear it from me, Mike.”

“Nor me, you dope. But don’t put it past McIntyre to use anything he can to discredit our actions.”

Sullivan shrugged. “McIntyre is pond scum. I wasn’t going to shoot Ted just to save his despicable ass.” His expression grew sombre. “I’ve never shot a man, Mike. It’s not as easy as our training tries to make it. I looked at Ted in the doorway, and I saw a father of a teenage boy, a father who spent most of his free time driving that kid around the province in pursuit of his dream. A dream that’s just been shattered in the blink of an eye, because he’d put his trust in that snake. I could feel his rage. There but for the grace of God...”

Green set down his beer, untouched. “But don’t forget the other side of that rage. That same dream drove the father to strike an innocent woman and then chop her body into pieces.”

“I know. I wasn’t thinking of that when my finger refused to squeeze the trigger. Maybe if I had...” He tossed back half his beer, and Green saw the faint tremor in his hand.

It was almost nine o’clock when Green arrived back home. The sky had cleared, and the June sun had just set. Long spears of orange shot across the darkening sky. He had stopped on his way home to visit Sue Peters and had walked with her and Gibbs out onto the grounds of the rehab centre to enjoy the last warm rays of the sinking sun. Sue had leaned on Gibbs as they walked, but Green sensed that perhaps that was more by choice than by necessity. Her face still bore the scars of her beating, and her speech was more measured, as if each word now required conscious thought. But she had stood unsupported while he told her he was looking for a way to get her back into the squad room, even if only a couple of hours a week for now, and he pretended not to see the tears that sprang to her eyes.

Afterwards, he had longed to drive straight down to the cottage, but when he drove through a red light and missed the turn to his own street, he realized the roller coaster day had finally caught up with him. Besides, there were still far too many loose ends to tie up on the case before he could even consider escaping to the country. Furthermore, he’d not had a chance to connect with Hannah since her close call the day before, and he was grateful to hear the television blaring through the house when he opened the door.

He found Hannah sitting on the living room floor, chatting on her cell phone as if nothing had happened. He felt an overwhelming desire to hug her, but contented himself with a quick kiss on her head. To his surprise, she hung up her phone and shut off the
TV
.

“I’ve been watching the news. That unidentified female minor they’re talking about at the agent’s house? Was that Crystal?”

Green hesitated, then threw the rule book out the window. After what she’d done for Crystal yesterday, Hannah deserved to know. He sat down beside her on the couch. “Yes. She’s all right. Physically, that is. McIntyre claimed he wasn’t going to hurt her, just persuade her not to implicate him in the drugs Lea took.” Seeing her roll her eyes in disbelief, he shrugged. “I know. Hard to disprove, though. He claimed the bad drugs were all Crystal’s doing, to get Riley away from Lea.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it?” She raised her head, startled. She was without her trademark pale make-up and black eyes, which had served so well to camouflage her, and without them she looked ten years old. Her pixie expression grew thoughtful.

“When we were talking yesterday,” she said, “she didn’t seem upset about Lea—like, dying and stuff. I mean, not as upset as you’d expect. She was more worried about herself, about getting caught and going to jail. She never said that McIntyre tricked her or that she didn’t know about the laced drugs, just that no one was supposed to die.”

Green thought about her increasingly worried cell phone messages to Lea that night. Yes, the girl had known the drugs were dangerous. Potentially deadly. “Do you think she could be that conniving and cold-blooded to not care if Lea died?”

“She always was a stupid, selfish girl. Beyond that...” Hannah lifted her palms in a gesture of defeat. “They were probably in it together. Who knows which one had the original idea.”

We’ll probably never know for sure, thought Green, reviewing the fleeting glimpses he’d had of the girl. First, standing at the accident scene, slack with horror and grief at the carnage she had unleashed. Then slouching defiantly out of the interview room under the dead-eyed stare of her stepfather. And finally, cowering in the corner of McIntyre’s lair, her raw fear already giving way to defeat.

The fight for survival, the primacy of self, was all she’d ever known.

Crystal had no priors, and she was only sixteen years old. She came from a wretched, loveless home and had been lured into dubious company. She’d get a slap on the wrist, maybe six months’ probation, then she’d be free again, back in the same wretched home with the same sleazy friends. Until life dangled another temptation in front of her eyes.

As if she were reading his mind, Hannah leaned over and picked a long dog hair off her grungy jeans. “I’ve been thinking... Next fall I want to go to regular high school. The kids at Norman Bethune... I don’t really fit in any more.”

Next fall, he thought, and his chest tightened. He’d won a reprieve, and maybe—just maybe—he was starting to be a father to this girl.

One

Pumpkins!” Tony shrieked, his dark eyes dancing as he struggled to get out of his bike trailer. “Daddy, look at all the pumpkins! Can we buy three?”

Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green leaned on his handlebars, red-faced and gasping for breath. Sweat poured into his eyes and soaked through his Bagelshop
T
-shirt. The mere thought of lugging three huge pumpkins all the way back home in the bike trailer alongside his four-year-old son exhausted him. The Sunday morning bike excursion to the Byward Market had been his wife’s idea. He’d been angling for the car, but Sharon had ladled on the guilt. The environment, fitness, family togetherness. “How many more gorgeous sunny days will we have before the snow falls?” she’d said. “Besides, we’d never find a parking place.”

Looking out over the crowded streets, he privately admitted she was right. September was the peak time for local fruits and vegetables, and people fought their way along the street stalls looking for the best bargains in brightly-coloured sweet peppers, fragrant apples and cauliflower so huge, it would take all winter to eat one. Street buskers cashed in on the crowds, playing everything from classical flute to African drums, and the musical chaos rose up over the roar of engines and the chatter of farmers hawking their goods.

Green had grown up in the heart of old Bytown, and twice a year he liked to bring his son down to the inner city to experience the authentic old farmers’ market. Once in the spring, when the maple syrup and flower vendors first brought the market back to life, then again at harvest time. In these brief visits, he saw it once more as a source of life and colour, and not as a dishevelled, dissolute playground of drunks, hookers and predators. It took a conscious effort to set aside the twenty-five soul-battering years in the trenches and to reclaim the innocence he’d felt as a youth, but his own son’s joy was the only reminder he needed.

“Gelatos first, honey,” Sharon said with a laugh. A mango gelato from Piccolo Grande had been the bribe she’d offered Green to tip the scales. They navigated their bikes cautiously down the busy street that bordered the market, past the hideous barricades of the new American embassy and down a street of limestone heritage buildings, formerly nuns’ cloisters but now converted into trendy shops. Inside the gelato shop, it took ten minutes to debate the choices, but they finally emerged with mango, chocolate and strawberry.

As they sat on the bench to eat their cones, Green found his cop’s gaze roving, picking out the darker parallel world beneath the bustle and cheer of the marketplace. The bearded pan-handler on the corner, the tiny, almost prepubescent sex trade worker advertising her wares at the traffic light, two skinheads in leather and chains swaggering down the street with a muzzled pit bull tightly held in hand. Perhaps the two were innocent, but more likely they were looking for sport. A solitary black, or a woman in a hijab. I have my eye on you punks, he thought, as his son chattered excitedly beside him.

Green claimed it was a curse, but in truth, the menace of the streets set his pulse racing. Here, amid the diesel fumes and crumbling streets, the eclipsed dreams and discarded hopes, he’d first felt his calling. He thought ahead to his week of meetings within the corporate walls of the Elgin Street mothership. Meetings with the
RCMP
, with his
NCO
s, with his boss, Superintendent Barbara Devine, who was shoring up her bid for the vacant Deputy Chief’s job. Would he even survive?