Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (95 page)

Sullivan was just returning to the car to check on the street canvassing when a late-model red pick-up revved around the corner and screeched into the drive. Out leaped a tall, muscular man whom Green estimated to be in his mid thirties. The man rushed at the detectives, his hand extended heartily.

“Sorry, officers. The house business—never a dull moment!” He lifted a huge ring of keys from his belt, selected one and unlocked the door with one expert twist. Inside his cluttered office, Green and Sullivan took the client chairs while Fitzpatrick went behind his desk. He flipped on his computer and punched the answering machine button before he’d even sat down. Then, as the first of sixteen messages began to drone, he looked at Sullivan sheepishly.

“Sorry, force of habit. No secretary, no partners, just me always rushing to stay on top of the business.” He paused the machine but couldn’t keep his eyes from straying to his email box briefly before he swung around.

“Okay!” He clasped both hands together on the desk before him like a man salivating to make a deal. “Is it about the body? It’s the talk of the town.”

Green couldn’t resist. “And what’s the town saying?”

“Some homeless guy?”

“No rumours as to his identity?” Green asked.

“None I heard. But what’s it got to do with the Pettigrew place?”

Green didn’t reply, reminding himself that it was Sullivan’s case and he ought to let him decide how to play it. Sullivan chose to play it casual.

“Who’s handling the sale of the church? Your firm?”

Fitzpatrick’s face fell. “Oh no! That’s a firm from Ottawa. I used to list that place, but...no one’s been able to sell it.”

“But you can access the key if you have a client. You have the combination to the lock box, right?”

“Well, I can get it. We can all get it. But I hardly ever show it. People want waterfront properties, not a musty old rock pile in the middle of town.”

Green glanced around the office. Despite the country clutter, it sported the latest in electronic gadgets. There were no pictures of wife and children, but Fitzpatrick clearly loved his expensive outdoor toys. Snowmobiles and four-by-fours were everywhere, and one photo showed him posing with a friend in front of a sleek, white motorboat, holding up a fish that must have been three feet long. Slimy-looking thing, Green thought with distaste, but the two men were grinning from ear to ear.

“I guess the waterfront business has been good to you, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Green remarked.

“Please, call me Sandy. Good investment, in today’s times. People are snapping it up all over Ontario. If you detectives are interested—”

Sullivan stepped in to head off the sales pitch. “What can you tell us about the Pettigrews?”

Sandy looked startled at the sudden change, then his face took on a regretful air. “What can I say? Sad, sad situation. The great-great-grandfather hacked the farm out of the wilderness himself back in the early eighteen hundreds, and his grandson built that brick house in the 1890s. Raised dairy cattle, owned the creamery here in town, had the best stud bulls in the county. Now they’re all gone, and the farm’s been bought by a civil servant from Ottawa, who’s not going to raise a single head.”

“What can you tell us about the more recent Pettigrews?” Sullivan asked. “Did you know them?”

“Oh yeah, everybody knew them. I went to school with the Pettigrew boys, and the adjacent farm is still in my family, thank God. What do you want to know for?” His jaw dropped. “Oh my God, was the dead man a Pettigrew?”

“Who’s been living there recently?”

“Just—just the old man. And Robbie off and on. He’s the youngest. There were five boys, so it gets confusing. But all the others...well...”

“Do you know where the others are?”

Sandy stared across the table at them in silence, his hearty façade quite gone. “If you think one of them is the body in the churchyard, I want to know, because they used to be friends of mine.”

Sullivan laid the photo on the desk without a word. Sandy stared at it fixedly, his colour slowly draining from his face.

“Holy crap,” he muttered. “What a mess.”

“Can you recognize him?”

Sandy wagged his head back and forth helplessly. “It might be one of the boys. It’s hard to tell from this, and I haven’t seen them in a long time.”

“Have you got their current addresses? Or any idea where they are?”

Sandy’s eyes strayed to the photo again, and he stared at it in bewilderment. “When I was growing up, they were a happy family. Religious and strict, but happy. I used to love to play over there. But they’ve had more tragedies than any family was ever meant to bear—one by one they left home, until in the end all that remained was Robbie and his father.”

“Could this be Robbie?”

Sandy shook his head firmly. “Robbie’s much younger than the others. In his late twenties, I’d say. But I haven’t seen any of the others since they were in their teens or early twenties, so it’s impossible to know. I mean, that’s twenty years ago.” Sandy eyed the photo again with a shiver of distaste. “Poor Robbie. Now he’ll have one more thing to contend with. Some guys never get an even break.”

When Green and Sullivan emerged from Sandy’s office, it was past five o’clock and the autumn sun was sinking fast. Green realized a quick check with both home and office was in order, to ensure that no major crises had occurred in either place while they’d been vacationing in the country. Sullivan, meanwhile, wanted to check on the progress his team had made in the village.

The massive white truck that served as a mobile command post had arrived and sat on the grassy verge opposite the church. On the outside, it looked like an oversized chip wagon, but inside it was stocked with the latest in surveillance and communications devices. The two detectives logged in with the scribe before settling down at the work stations. The harvest from phone calls and email checks was meagre, however. On Green’s end, he was happy that Bob had not knocked the house down and that no murders or grievous crimes had cropped up in his absence. Sullivan was less delighted to learn that virtually nothing useful had turned up, either in the canvass of the town nor in the intensive search of the church grounds. Although the name Pettigrew had surfaced a few times, no one could be certain who the dead man was.

But no one would be surprised if it was a Pettigrew at the bottom of the tower. It was a cursed family, they said.

Sullivan logged off, stifled a yawn and headed to the door. “Time to get back to the city, Mike. We’ve got the current address on this Robbie, so I’ll take the photo to him after I drop you off. Hopefully, he’ll be able to
ID
his own brother and we can wrap this up, pending MacPhail’s autopsy report and the tox results. We’ve found no one who saw an altercation or another individual near the church, and the victim had no defensive wounds on his body, so it’s looking like a self-inflicted. There’s no evidence to suggest foul play was involved.”

“Except the broken wall and the torn piece of jacket,” Green countered. “That could suggest a struggle.”

Sullivan shrugged. “Not much of one, according to Ident. More consistent with him trying to climb over the wall.”

Maybe, Green thought, but there were a few more questions that needed answering before he would be willing to sign off on it. Such as why had the man returned, what was he searching for at his parents’ farm, why had he chosen that particular church?

And perhaps most importantly, how did he get in? Ident reported no evidence of forced entry, the huge padlock hadn’t been touched in years, and the back door had been locked when the police arrived. It was the self-locking kind that the victim might have pulled shut after his entry, but unless he had the skill to crack a combination lock, how had he unlocked the door in the first place?

All in all, it had been an intriguing day, Green thought as they drove back into the city. Manure aside, the air had been crisp and fresh, the fall colours spectacular. The pace out here was slower and the sense of history more vivid than the life he was accustomed to, yet it was important for the Major Crimes Squad to be sensitive to the difference. He felt less hurried and discouraged than he usually felt at the end of a typical office day, and he was quite looking forward to an evening with his family. Even the prospect of the dismantled kitchen did not bother him. Maybe they’d all go out to dinner and spend a bit of real time together.

But when he opened his front door, he found himself just in time to overhear the full blast of adolescent wrath.

“Forget it! You had no fucking business going through my things, and I’m not giving it back! Even if you ground me for a hundred years!”

Four

 S
haron Green had staggered through the front door an hour earlier, her head pounding and her feet on fire. Hospital budget cuts were going to do her in. Psychiatric nursing had always been emotionally draining, but as the patients got sicker and their inpatient stays briefer, it was the physical exhaustion she noticed most. She had spent much of her shift trying to wrestle a three hundred pound depressive out of bed into a bath, and she felt rancid from head to toe.

Hannah’s bedroom door was closed, but the pulse of rock music shook the entire house. Something the girl had in common with her father, Sharon observed, surprised yet again by how similar they were, despite having been apart all Hannah’s life.

Sharon knocked on Hannah’s door and waited for an invitation, well aware of her tenuous status as stepmother. A grunt answered her, but in her frazzled state, that was enough. She peeked in.

“I’m ducking into the shower,” she said. “Would you please watch Tony for a few minutes?”

Hannah was sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing something which she snapped shut at the sight of Sharon. She smiled, not at Sharon but at Tony, who was squirming in her arms.

“I’ll take him out,” she said unexpectedly. “I want to mail a letter anyway.”

Sharon knew better than to question the motive for this minor miracle. It was enough that Hannah was volunteering to do something helpful.

Two minutes later, Sharon peeled off her clothes, then stopped at the entrance to the bathroom with dismay. It looked as if a hurricane had hit. The walls dripped moisture, the window and mirror were steamed up, three soggy towels lay scattered on the floor, and Hannah’s school clothes were in a lump outside the shower where she had stepped out of them. Sharon gritted her teeth. Resolutely, she opened the window, picked up the towels and tossed them into the hamper. She resisted the urge to fold the clothes; instead she scooped them up, carted them to Hannah’s room and tossed them on the bed. A gold chain slipped out and fell to the floor.

When she retrieved it and saw what it was, she hesitated. Mike would not be thrilled, but Hannah had been entirely raised by his ex-wife with, as the ex-wife was fond of pointing out, no help from him. If Ashley had seen fit to give Hannah an elaborate gold crucifix, who had the right to protest? Sharon turned the cross over and saw there was an inscription, delicate and worn, but still legible.

“To Derek, with all our love, Mother and Dad.”

She frowned. Hannah was a petite girl with elfin features and sparkling blue eyes. Sharon knew she had already cast her social net wide in the four months she’d been in Ottawa, but Sharon hadn’t realized she’d snared a boy in that time. Snared him so thoroughly that he’d given her a precious piece of personal jewellery.

Sharon put the crucifix on the dresser and headed into the shower. She said nothing when Hannah returned, waiting instead until the girl wandered into the kitchen an hour later, drawn by that unerring instinct of teenagers and pets for the impending arrival of food. Sharon offered her a carrot stick, which Hannah ignored.

“So who’s Derek?”

Hannah’s eyes flew wide in surprise. “What?”

“Derek. The boy who gave you the pendant.”

“Pendant?” Hannah seemed genuinely puzzled, then outrage replaced the surprise on her face. “You searched my room!”

“No, I cleaned up the bathroom.”

“But it was in my pocket!”

Sharon leaned against the counter, sensing that she was handling the situation all wrong. She sought for a way to salvage the scene. “Hannah, I wasn’t trying to be nosy. It fell out, and I wouldn’t mention it but—”

“Then don’t!”

“But it’s obviously something very meaningful from the boy’s parents, and I don’t think-”

“He gave it to me!”

“I know he did, and I’m sure his heart was in the right place.”

But Hannah was having none of it. She turned red, as if her very freedom were being challenged, and took a deep breath to launch into her counterstrike. At the very moment of that counterstrike, Green walked in. Hannah took one look at him and flounced out of the room. The whole house shook when her bedroom door slammed.

Green drew Sharon into his arms and kissed her black curls. “So how was your day?”

“Hellish,” she replied, snuggling into the warmth of his arms. He smelled of raw earth. “And that was before I came home to that.”

“And what was that?”

As she gave him a brief summary, his expression grew rueful. “Boys,” he muttered. “I was hoping for a little more training time before we faced boys.”

“She’s a pretty girl. But she’s got the attention span of a flea, Mike. I’m sorry, but she’ll dump this poor Derek next week, and then he’ll be out a valuable crucifix.”

“Then next week we’ll mail it back to him.”

She swatted him, chuckling. “Coward. There’s an important principle at work here, which I think Hannah should learn.”

“When I was a kid, I hated to be told I was wrong.”

“What do you mean, when you were a kid?”

It was his turn to chuckle. “Touché. The point is, I usually knew. And if people gave me enough space...”

“What’s enough space?”

“Till tomorrow?”

In fact, an hour was all that was needed. Hannah didn’t emerge from her bedroom for dinner, but when Green tapped on her door afterwards, he was greeted not by silence or cursing but by a surprisingly subdued “Come in”. He found her sitting on her bed, writing. She didn’t smile, didn’t even glance up, but at least she was calm.