Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (87 page)

Dark temp-ta-tion
Velvet hammers pound
Des-per-a-tion
Clawing hungers hound
De-gra-da-tion
Cast upon the ground
De-so-la-tion
Blackness all around

Green listened with increasing respect. The recording was amateurish and the sound tinny, but the talent shone through. Talent snuffed out before it ever had a chance to soar. As the last bleak strains of the chorus died away, the door opened behind him and Sharon came in to slip her arms around his neck. He braced himself for a lecture, but instead she kissed the top of his head. “What’s that?”

“Rebecca Whelan’s brother had a band,” he replied. “They were heavy into Greek mythology.”

“He was talented.”

“Yes, he was.” Regret stole over him as he looked at the desolate picture on the screen before him. At the empty road stretching into the misty night. Had that been a metaphor for Billy Whelan’s life? Green pondered the sudden plunge from joy to despair in the song. The meaning of dark temptation and clawing hunger. Cocaine? Or something else.

Sharon leaned over his shoulder to tap the murky picture on the screen. “Jeeze, Mike, I wonder if he was the mistwalker. You were thinking mistwalker was a confidante or a friend of Fraser’s, but what if it’s a code name that Fraser gave to Billy, because of this picture?”

He swung around to look at her with excitement. Barely had her insight melded with his than his own vague idea crystallized, and a further piece of the puzzle tumbled into place.
Eros!

Before he could speak, a thunderous barking erupted downstairs, followed by the loud insistent ringing of the bell. The moment Sharon opened the door, Brian Sullivan strode in with a glint of triumph in his eye.

“We’ve been idiots, Mike! The truth has been staring us in the face!”

An hour earlier, Brian Sullivan had stepped into Billy Whelan’s apartment, shut the door and turned to absorb first impressions. Sparse, poor and none too clean; a place to sleep rather than a home. The off-white walls bore the stains of decades of grimy fingers, covered at intervals by pencil sketches on rough newsprint scotchtaped in place. The sketches were of animals—horses galloping with manes streaming, huskies straining eagerly in the traces, spaniels racing nose to the ground. For a moment Sullivan stood in front of the horse sketch, which was so keenly drawn that even the whites of the creature’s eyes conveyed the wild joy of running. The man might not have amounted to much else, but he could sure use a pencil.

Apart from the art, the one-room studio contained nothing but a shabby brown sofa bed, a TV propped on an upturned plastic crate, a coffee table, and against one wall a dresser and a stack of books on a homemade shelf. Sullivan poked through the books. Poetry, fantasy novels, computer manuals and three big tomes on deities and mythology. On top of the dresser sat a high-end mini sound system and a pile of CD s. Sullivan recognized some of the hard-edged bands which his daughter Lizzie normally turned her nose up at, along with an entire collection of Nirvana. There’s a hero to emulate, he reflected drily, if you’re into drug popping and suicide.

The kitchen held the bare minimum of cooking utensils and the cheap, simple food of the poor—rice, pasta, canned tuna and a bag of slightly mouldy potatoes. Buried behind winter coats at the back of the closet, he discovered a laptop computer and an assortment of expensive musical equipment, including an electric guitar. Sullivan was trying to buy Lizzie a guitar for her birthday, and he knew this one was twice the price of what he had in mind. Probably stolen, and now hidden from Billy’s creepier friends to prevent a repeat.

Crusted dishes emitted a rancid smell in the kitchen sink, and stained jockey shorts and T -shirts littered the floor. Sullivan did a quick search which turned up no cache of drugs or telltale accounts book. If Billy still had criminal connections, there was no evidence of it so far. But hidden under the stack of books on the makeshift shelf, he finally found a day book and three well-worn notebooks filled with poetry. A cursory examination of the day book revealed that Billy’s appointments had been pretty sparse in the months before his death, but most were in initials or shorthand. Which could mean anything, but to Sullivan’s suspicious cop mind, it suggested codes. The initials of buyers, perhaps?

He slipped the agenda book into an evidence bag for the drug squad, and as an afterthought put the poetry notebooks into a second bag for Green, who, with his university degrees, might be able to read something into the symbolism. For himself, Sullivan preferred the tangible fruits of old-fashioned evidence and real live witnesses.

He slipped back out the door, hoping to have more luck with the alleged girlfriend next door. But as he approached, he could hear a child crying even through the cinder block walls. It sounded like a full-blown preschooler’s temper tantrum, and he hesitated before he knocked, wondering if he should come back later. Tiffany Brown was unlikely to be in much of a mood to answer his questions even if she could hear them, and he needed all the answers he could get. As he stood outside her door debating what to do, he heard shrill swearing within, and the crying stopped abruptly. He gave the neighbour an extra minute to restore her calm, then knocked.

Tiffany Brown was not surprised to see him nor to learn that Billy Whelan was dead.

“Does that mean I never get my cheque back?” she demanded. Black mascara smudged her cheeks, and her hair hung in straw-like clumps over her eyes. But beneath the make-up, she looked barely older than Lizzie, and her halter top hung over a flat, bony chest. In the background, her little girl sat on the floor, engrossed in TV and eating a box of Oreos.

He steered adroitly around the question and inquired about any known enemies or conflicts involving Billy. She shrugged.

“He dreamed big, but he was such a loser. Probably wouldn’t have the nerve to hurt a fly. But he’s done time, and he did deal some when he needed the cash. He wasn’t big time, but he might have made enemies.”

“Anyone in particular?”

She blew a clump of hair out of her eyes and clucked with impatience. Behind her, a kettle began to whistle on the stove, but she ignored it.

“Well, there was this one guy creeped me right out. Showed up on my doorstep about a month ago, asking questions about Billy. Like was he a friend of mine, what was he like, did he ever have any visitors in his apartment? The guy seemed especially interested in my little girl. Gave me the creeps the way he kept looking at her.”

“Can you describe this man?”

“Yeah, like...mid-thirties, ordinary looking, dressed like a total geek. Brown hair long in the back like ten years ago. When I told Billy about it, he said it was probably some undercover cop.”

Sullivan studied his notes, careful to conceal his excitement. Tiffany had just given the perfect description of Matthew Fraser.

“But he was interested in your little girl, you say?”

“Yeah, well, like in how Billy treated her. Which was creepy, because that’s the reason I broke up with Billy. He was no good in bed with me, couldn’t hardly get it up most of the time, but he’d wrestle with Katie, tickling like, and he’d get these humongous hard-ons. Freaked me right out.”

Sixteen

“I knew it!” Green crowed
before Sullivan had even finished his story. “It’s so obvious! How the fuck did everyone miss it!”

“Well, after all, he was only fourteen–”

“Fourteen is plenty old enough, if you remember. My God, all the signs are there! Who else would she lie for?”

“Yeah, but we weren’t the only ones to miss it, Mike. Everyone much closer to the case—Barb Devine and the CAS , the family...”

The two men had the living room to themselves, and Green was sitting bolt upright on the sofa. Pain and adrenaline pulsed through him, scattering his thoughts. Sharon had barricaded Tony and the dog in the kitchen with her while she cleaned up dinner, and Tony’s incessant chatter washed over Green unheard as his thoughts slowly began to coalesce.

Green marvelled at how blind they’d all been to forget that children could be not only the victims but the perpetrators of evil, and that brotherly protectiveness and love could so easily transform into sex and domination. The abuse could have been going on for years, beginning as the barely pubescent curiosity of a ten-year-old and progressing slowly to physical exploration and experimentation, and finally to full-blown sexual acts. Beginning so innocuously that perhaps at first neither of them had thought anything wrong, until Billy’s adolescent urges coerced her into acts she found scary, disgusting or even painful enough to speak out. Since there had been no vaginal penetration, Billy may even have convinced himself that his little fondlings were harmless.

Yet now in hindsight, how clearly everything fit! Matthew Fraser had been wrongly accused from the start, a hapless target who was safer to finger than her own brother, and once Fraser had pulled himself together years later, he began his quest to find out who the guilty party was. He’d done research, analyzed court and newspaper records, and as his suspicions grew, he’d done his own questioning of Billy’s neighbours. When Tiffany tipped Billy off that Fraser was nosing around, Billy began to follow him, perhaps to frighten him or simply to find out what he knew. Fraser had compiled his case, tried to take it to his lawyer and, when that failed, to the CAS .

But especially now that his band’s success was finally within reach, Billy would have been desperate to prevent anyone from derailing his life’s dream. Somehow he must have intercepted Fraser outside the CAS and panicked him into flight. Fearing that no one was going to believe him and that Billy was on to him, Fraser had tried to go into hiding. But Billy tracked him down to the rooming house, and in that final confrontation, with his back to the wall and desperate to protect himself, Fraser had killed him.

Which meant they were still looking for a killer, but at least not the cold-blooded manipulator Green had feared him to be.

“I wonder what difference this makes to the safety of Janice Tanner,” Green mused. “Matthew Fraser may not be quite the bad guy we thought he was, but this still proves he’s capable of murder when he’s desperate. And after his last experience with the justice system, he’s not likely to surrender to us without a fight. No one’s been on this guy’s side. No one. I have a very bad feeling about what this guy’s capable of when he has nowhere left to turn.”

Sullivan fidgeted uneasily with his notebook, looking at war with himself, as if he had something to tell him, but didn’t want to.

“What?” Green felt a twinge of alarm. “Is there news about Anne Patterson?”

Sullivan shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I’m not sure it matters, but back in the original investigation, Anne may have tried to get the abuse charges dropped, but Devine—”

He stopped as his radio crackled faintly as his side. He turned it up to respond to his own call sign. A voice blasted over the radio, shrill with excitement, but the message was clear. The caller was part of the team conducting the search in the Lemieux Island vicinity. They had combed through all the underbrush and the abandoned house, and they’d just started along the water’s edge.

Sullivan broke through the travel commentary impatiently. “Any sign of the Tanner woman or the briefcase?”

“No, but—but we found a body, sir!”

“What?”

The officer was breathless, his young voice cracking. “We found a fucking body, half sunk just fifteen feet off the shore!”

Sullivan barrelled down Woodroffe Avenue through the corn fields with his red light flashing while Green hunkered down in the passenger seat, coordinating with the sergeant on the scene and calling in the police units that would be needed. The Ottawa-Gatineau area straddled the confluence of three large rivers and one canal, so recovering bodies was a well-established routine. Most of these were accidental drownings due to boating and snowmobile mishaps which often occurred many miles upstream, but the bodies were swept down by the strong current. The occasional one was a suicide leap from one of the city’s bridges. Only very rarely was it a case of foul play. Spring was the busiest time, as bodies began to warm up and rise to the surface. The section of the Ottawa River where this body had been found was deceptively fast moving, catching many a swimmer or kayaker by surprise. Green knew there was a good chance it had no relation to the Fraser case, but a knot of worry formed in his gut nonetheless.

Sullivan’s efficient driving delivered them to the entrance of the Lemieux Island Bridge in just over half an hour, but the scene was already beginning to look like a carnival. Four cruisers with flashing lights blocked the entrance to the bridge, and yellow tape cordoned off the entire copse of woods on the east side of the bridge. There was no sign yet of the boats and divers of the Underwater Search and Recovery Unit, but the Forensic Identification van was parked on the bridge in a line of official vehicles that included the black coroner’s van. Sullivan parked his Taurus behind the others, and the two of them climbed out.

Green scanned the surroundings to get his bearings and to form an initial impression of the terrain. The broad Ottawa River lay ahead of him, its shoreline meandering among a series of small islands, but its centre rushing deep and fast under the bridge. Along the water’s edge, sandwiched between the Parkway and the river, was a thin swath of parkland with overhanging trees and the occasional beach along the rocky shore. The sun blazed off the river, elongating the shadows of the police officers poking around in the tall grass. Crowds of joggers, cyclists and strollers on the bike path along the river had stopped to watch the drama, craning their necks past the yellow tape.

At the Lemieux Island Bridge, the riverbank curved out to form a peninsula covered with thick woods. Near the tip of the peninsula, jarringly out of place in this wooded setting, were the crumbling remains of an old stone house, beside which the shoreline disappeared into a thick clump of trees. It was in the trees, invisible from the Parkway or the bridge, that all the activity seemed to be focussed. Green could hear the murmur of voices and the crackle of radios through the bush. Could it be Fraser’s secret beach? he wondered, as the knot of worry tightened.