Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (218 page)

She had no argument left, so she hung her head meekly and buckled her seatbelt as he slammed on the accelerator. When he pulled up in front of the house, all appeared quiet. The white van was still in place, but the antique oak door to Rosenthal’s house was ajar. After instructing Lindsay to stay out of sight, Green walked back and hopped into the surveillance cruiser.

“I called you as soon as he arrived,” the patrol woman said. “He’s been in there about ten minutes.”

“Loading things into his van?”

“No, sir. He hasn’t come out at all.”

“What was he wearing? Carrying?”

“Jeans, a black shirt and a red fleece vest. Not carrying anything.”

Green pondered his options. The man did not appear to have a weapon, although no one knew what he had already stashed inside. Green sent the patrol woman’s junior partner back to sit with Lindsay and directed the patrol woman to accompany him. Together they slipped into the house and listened at the interior door. Nothing but the creak of floors and the rustling of what sounded like papers. Green banged on the door.

There was no answer. The faint sound of movement ceased. Green knocked again, his best, authoritative police knock. He heard a curse, footsteps, and the door flew open. The man looming before him was well over six feet, trim, handsome and lithe on his feet despite his grey hair. He peered down at Green irritably.

“Yes?”

Green flashed his badge and pushed past him into the room. A quick scan revealed that some of the paintings were gone and that the filing cabinet drawers were open. Stacks of papers littered the mahogany dining table.

“Who are you?” Green snapped.

“And who the hell are you?”

“You’re trespassing, sir. Please answer the question.”

“I’m Dr. David Rosenthal. I have every right to be here.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Rosenthal. I’m Inspector Green, in charge of your father’s investigation. These premises are still under police authority—” A small lie, but the man got his back up. “Nothing is to be touched or removed until we release it.”

“It’s my property! I’m his heir.”

“The disposition of his property is a matter for the courts, and his executor. Surely, Dr. Rosenthal, you’re aware of proper procedure.”

Rosenthal grunted and turned away. “I’ve already spoken to his lawyer. There’s nothing valuable here. I’m taking a few personal papers and some paintings my mother bought years ago.”

“Why did you not contact the police when you heard of your father’s death? You must have known we wanted to speak to you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry if I violated proper procedure. I was reacting to my father’s death.”

“Yet the first thing you do upon arriving in town is to try to spirit things out of his apartment.”

“My
things. Therefore mine to take. And I resent your insinuations. I didn’t ‘spirit’ them. I don’t have a lot of time to pick up what little I want of this.” He flicked his hand to encompass the elegant but shabby old-fashioned furniture.

Green was tempted to tell him about the new will, which he either didn’t know about or was pretending not to know about. But he resisted the cheap gesture of retaliation. There would come a better time for that. Instead he asked for some identification. After a pause, Rosenthal produced his passport. American. Green studied it for a few seconds longer than necessary, flipping through the pages to see the visas and customs stamps. The ex-wife was right; the man travelled all over the world.

Rosenthal said nothing, feigning disinterest. Green thought it telling that he had expressed no curiosity about his father’s case, not even asking how he’d died, let alone at whose hand.

“I understand you and your father were estranged.”

Rosenthal tucked his passport back into his pocket as if buying himself time. “Is that a crime up here?”

“I’m wondering why you didn’t contact the police for details when you arrived.”

“I got all the details I needed online.” He grimaced. “Sounded like a pointless mugging by a couple of immigrant thugs. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Nonetheless, sir—”

“Am I under arrest here? Because otherwise I’d like you to leave. You’re trespassing—”

Green’s temper flashed, but he clamped it down. He wanted Rosenthal to lose his temper, not himself. “No,
you’re
trespassing, Mr. Rosenthal. And refusing to answer police questions—”

“Because I know they’ll be pointless!” Rosenthal shot back. “I haven’t seen my father in ten years, we didn’t communicate, he didn’t even know he has a grandson! I have no idea what he was doing with his life or who his friends or enemies are, although I bet there are few of the former. The man had lots of time for broken souls, but plain ordinary human warmth was in short supply. I don’t recall ever meeting a single genuine friend of his growing up. I have no idea who might have killed him and frankly I don’t give a rat’s ass—”

“Then why refuse—”

“Because I’m not an idiot. I know you’ll be trying to pin this on me. The only son, a high flyer, caught in the middle of the global economic meltdown, estranged from his father but set to inherit the father’s millions. I know cops. Imagination is not a big requirement of the job. I figured up here in this keystone cop backwater, I’d be your number one suspect!”

Green burst out laughing. “I’m sorry. You’d be the darling of my superiors. They don’t like my imagination either.”

Rosenthal darkened from red to purple. He stepped forward as if to take a swing, then checked himself. Drawing himself up, he stepped backwards with a mock bow. “There you go. I expect I’ve answered all your questions.”

“All but one,” said Green, still smiling. “Where were you on the night of September—”

A prolonged horn blared outside. Distant but approaching fast. Instantly alert to trouble, Green and the patrolwoman rushed to the bay window. Metal flashed in the sun as Brian Sullivan’s brand new black Chevy pick-up slewed across the lawn on the corner and rocketed towards them at full speed, horn blasting. The patrol woman cried aloud, while Green stood frozen, unable to move as before his horrified eyes, the truck smashed headlong into Green’s staff car, obliterating the back end.

The bang shattered the calm of the street. Glass and metal flew from the impact and ricocheted off other vehicles in the road. The horn stopped abruptly, replaced by an ominous hiss.

Green came alive. “Call 911!” he screamed at the shocked officer beside him. Not waiting for a response, he raced outside, vaguely aware of Rosenthal at his heels. Neighbours too ran from their houses towards the scene.

Smoke and steam were hissing from the tangled wreckage. The stink of rubber and raw gasoline filled the air. “Stay back, stay back!” Green shouted at the neighbours. “Get pillows and blankets.”

At first Green could see nothing in Sullivan’s truck except the ballooning air bag, but as the bag deflated, he could see Sullivan wedged in the driver’s side, his head slumped forward on the dash. The truck’s powerful front grill was crushed, and the hood was folded like a tent, but the cab looked intact. “Thank God, thank God”, the words raced unbidden through his mind.

In the next instant, he realized the truck’s cab was sitting on top of his crushed staff car. He reached the car and peered inside. The entire rear passenger compartment was folded in on itself beneath the cab, and he could just make out the bloodied head and shoulders of the junior patrolman. Of Lindsay, there was no sign. His hopes lifted faintly. Perhaps she had given up the wait.

He tried the doors. Jammed tight. He ran around the car and peered through the shattered window at a carnage of blood and glass. This time he caught a glimpse of a single, blood-soaked frilly purple cuff. Fuck!

“I need help here!” a deep voice bellowed. Green glanced back to see Rosenthal trying to haul Sullivan’s inert, two hundred-and-fifty-pound body through the shattered glass window of the driver’s door. “There’s no pulse!” he snapped, slamming his fist into Sullivan’s chest.

Green abandoned the staff car and raced to help him, snagging a hefty young onlooker to help in the rescue. Sullivan’s body was eerily limp, his face ashen and his eyes slightly open. Their sightless gaze sent a shaft of horror down Green’s spine.

The four men heaved and hauled to wrestle the body free, until finally it flopped like a limp sack onto the pavement. Without a second’s hesitation, Rosenthal leaped astride him, performing
CPR
. His focus was absolute as he shouted out commands.

Green felt Sullivan’s neck for a pulse, praying to a nameless god. Nothing. He heard the distant sirens. One. Two. Three. Soon the street was awash in red strobe lights and emergency workers swarmed the scene. He left Sullivan’s side to speak to the one in charge. Firefighters descended on the crushed car and paramedics took over at Sullivan’s side, hooking up their monitors and preparing the defibrillator. More ambulances were called in, along with the jaws of life.

Sullivan was rushed away first, surrounded by tubes, wires and a cluster of very grave, purposeful paramedics. As they left, they gave Green a single curt headshake. As he watched the ambulance scream off with full lights and siren, he fought a lump in his throat. At least Sullivan was alive. They had established a heartbeat. Of sorts.

It took an hour to free the junior patrolman and load him into another ambulance. He was bloodied and unconscious, but at least this time the paramedics had flashed a thumbs up as they drove away.

The jaws of life took a long time to unpeel the metal, wire and blood-soaked upholstery from the broken body of Lindsay Corsin. She had been sitting on the right side of the back seat beside the patrolman, waiting for Green. As he had asked her to. The right side had taken the brunt of Sullivan’s truck.

The firefighters and paramedics who had fought to free her stood in a small circle around her, reduced to silence. Green wanted to scream, weep, run for miles in howling abandon. Instead he called the coroner, Superintendent Devine, and the Chief ’s office. Then he began the painful job of contacting the university to track down Lindsay Corsin’s next of kin.

Thirteen

Rideau Psychiatric Hospital was a sprawling collection of buildings set helter skelter amid grassy nooks and towering trees which glowed orange and red in the afternoon sun. Sharon’s ward was on the sixth floor of one of the main buildings, modern and brightened by large windows that looked out over the grounds. She arrived fifteen minutes early for her evening shift, snatched up Caitlin O’Malley’s chart off the cart, and sequestered herself in the back room off the nursing station. The chart was thick, testament to the number of admissions the woman had had.

Sharon wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Evidence somewhere of a connection to Dr. Rosenthal, of mistreatment or misdiagnosis on his part. Something to explain why her name was on the list of Rosenthal’s beneficiaries in his will.

The resident’s history on her admission summary documented a sad but all too familiar struggle. Caitlin’s psychiatric problems had begun eight years ago, when she had started hearing voices and come to believe she was the love child of God and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. She had been picked up by the
RCMP
outside the Prime Minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive, where she was parading with a placard that read “Dad, let me come home.”

She had been twenty years old at the time and a student of mathematics at the University of Ottawa. She’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A six-week inpatient stint and a prescription for olanzapine had set her back on the right track, and she had completed her degree, snagging a husband in the process. Her husband was a born-again Christian and soon had her attending his church and seeking the healing hands of the visiting evangelical minister. He’d pronounced her cured, she’d thrown away her meds and six months later was outside Stornoway, the home of the Official Opposition, claiming that she’d been misled by Satan. Opposition leader Stephen Harper was her father, and her mother was a siren who had seduced him in the middle of an Alberta canola field. Only Stephen Harper could exorcise the evil in her genes.

Sharon suppressed a rueful laugh. The resident, the wide-eyed rookie Dr. Janic, had recorded all this delusional material in colourful detail, probably uncertain which nuggets of information might be important to her diagnostic profile. This time a couple of other diagnoses were tossed around, including manic episode, and a cocktail of anti-psychotic and mood-stabilizing drugs was prescribed. In the process, she divorced her husband, her father was put in charge, and a community treatment order was issued to force her to take her medications and attend support sessions. Staff shortages and lack of resources doomed that plan before the ink was even dry, and Caitlin spent a few months on the lam on the streets of Toronto before her father found her and brought her back into the family fold.

The father had obviously tried to keep her stable, because he had hooked her up with a respected private psychiatrist, and her next admission was not until two years later. This time, she had abandoned her meds and was living on the streets of Montreal with a dog and a crack addict twice her age. Renewed contact with her father’s psychiatrist friend, a prescription for a more powerful drug, and Caitlin was back at home enrolled in graduate school.

The new drug had dangerous side effects and would have required much closer medical monitoring, but there were no further notations in the chart until her admission three days ago. Things had obviously deteriorated, however. She’d been picked up by the police, who originally thought she was a regular prostitute until they had her in the cellblock. She curled up in the corner by the toilet, wrapped her arms over her head, and started to rock. Silent, unresponsive, but terrified the moment anyone approached. It had taken six officers, an ambulance, and a shot of halperidol to get her to the emergency room at the Ottawa Hospital.

Sharon leafed through the file again more carefully, but there was no mention of Dr. Rosenthal. He had never been her treating psychiatrist, nor had she ever given his name to emergency room staff.