None So Blind (23 page)

“Breakfast was eight hours ago.” Sullivan opened the bag on his desk and took out two smoked meat sandwiches on rye. “From Bobby’s Table. Not quite Nate’s, but …”

Green smiled. “Yeah, but they’re trying. Thanks.” He reached for the thick, meaty sandwich, his mouth already watering. Bobby’s Table had been opened by the staff of the iconic Nate’s Deli after it closed. “Did you hear —”

Sullivan held up his hand. “Not now. Eat first. You have a lot on your plate, Mike. You have to take time for yourself, or before you know it, you’ve burned out your body. Believe me.”

Sullivan propped his big feet on Green’s desk and tucked into his own sandwich. It reminded Green of the old days, except that now Sullivan was fifty pounds slimmer and the sandwich was roast turkey with lettuce on multi-grain.

“How’s your dad?” Sullivan asked as he sipped his water.

Green reached back through the mists of the day to recall the disastrous noontime visit. God, how could he have forgotten so quickly? “Bad,” he said with a grimace. “Worse than bad.”

As he sketched the worst of the story, an idea that had been hovering half-formed in his thoughts began to take shape. Sullivan listened without interruption, but when Green was done, it was he who put the idea into words.

“You know what you’re saying, Mike. You have to bring him home.”

Green nodded. “But we have no room, and our life is so busy. Three kids —”

“You have the sun porch.”

“It’s a mess. And it’s freezing in winter.”

“This is summer. And there’s nothing a bit of carpentry and a lick of paint won’t fix.”

Green laughed. Sullivan had finished his water and was looking yearningly at Green’s Coke. “Me? Carpentry?”

“I’ll bring over my tools Saturday. We’ll have the place set up in no time. Get a hospital bed, a portable toilet —”

“There’s Sharon too. She’ll be left with all the work. No matter how much I promise to help, I’m not there.”

“Mike …” Sullivan paused. “Realistically, how long are we talking? A couple of months?”

“If that.” He couldn’t voice the sense of loss that hovered beyond his words. Unless his father found a new reason to go on, he likely wouldn’t live out the month. That cinched it. There was no way his father was going to die alone in some dismal hospital bed. “Let me talk to the family about it tonight.”

“Good. My truck will be waiting.” Sullivan bunched the paper bag into a ball and lobbed it over Green’s desk, hitting the basket dead on, just like the old days too. He grinned. “Now that you’re fed and you have a plan for your dad, we can talk about Marilyn Carmichael’s bombshell.”

Green filled him in on Marilyn’s confession and her horrific discovery in the basement of her home. As he talked, his anger toward her faded. She was right; they had all been blind. Only Rosten, who had known his own innocence, had seen the truth.

Sullivan was frowning. “But what about the letter Rosten sent you? He changed his mind at the end and decided the killer was someone else.”

“He had a new theory, yes.” Green broke off, his head spinning. This didn’t make
sense.
“I haven’t had a chance to fill you in on the camera. He had a visitor the night he died, and caught some of the details on camera. Not enough to identify his killer …”

Sullivan looked astonished. “But that creates another problem! Because even if Lucas killed Jackie, he couldn’t have killed Rosten.”

“I know. It means we have two killers.”

Sullivan picked up his water bottle and twirled it absently. “Maybe,” he said finally. “If we believe Marilyn.”

“
If
? It was a hell of a difficult admission for her to make!”

Sullivan held up his hand as if to plead for patience. “But she destroyed the evidence, so we have no independent corroboration. But assuming she’s correct, Lucas killed Jackie and someone else killed Rosten. That’s a stretch.”

“Not necessarily. Payback for killing Jackie was always one of the possible motives.”

“Okay.” Sullivan still looked dubious. “Who do we have in the frame?”

Green sketched his thoughts on the short list of potential suspects. “I’ve got Halifax tracking down alibis for Rosten’s ex-wife and daughter, and Gibbs trying to find Lazlo. We do know that the suspect likely drives a dark-coloured Honda or Hyundai SUV and may have long dark hair. The Carmichaels’ vehicle is a forest-green CR-V, and Gordon has long hair and no reliable alibi.”

As Sullivan listened, his eyes narrowed and the skepticism in them faded. At the end he leaned forward thoughtfully. “Tom Henriksson drives a charcoal-grey Hyundai Tuscon, and he’s got no alibi for the time frame either. This is a very protective guy.”

Green felt that familiar surge of triumph when a new lead appeared, but before he could track the implications, his phone rang.

“Sir?” It was Sue Peters’s voice, breathless with excitement. “Sorry to interrupt, but …”

Sullivan frowned and reached to open the door, revealing Peters on her phone just outside. To her credit, she turned pink with embarrassment. “Is this a bad time, sir?”

In spite of himself, Green laughed. He saw the muscles twitch at the corner of Sullivan’s lips as well. “What is it, Sue?”

Peters waved her notebook. “You know those phone numbers you gave Bob this morning?”

“What did you find?”

“One of them has belonged to someone else for ten years, but the other one went to voice mail.” Peters rushed on, as if afraid she’d be cut off at any second. “It was a woman. She didn’t give her name but Bob did a reverse phone look-up and it’s registered to a Donna Zionti. Turns out she’s Erik Lazlo’s wife, which is why we never found a home number for him. Bob left a message saying if this was Erik Lazlo’s number, could he please contact police. The woman just called!”

“Which number was it?”

She held out her notebook and Green recognized the number Archie Goodfellow had found. “What did she say?”

“Well, that’s the thing! She said she hasn’t seen or heard from him in almost a week. She wants to report him missing!”

“Ask her to come in.”

“Already done. She’s on her way.”

“He’s gonna kill me,” Donna Zionti said once Green and Peters had her settled in a comfortable interview room. She overflowed the easy chair, a lumpy sausage of a woman with jet-black hair that frizzed in the heat. She was perspiring freely, whether from the heat, anxiety, or the exertion of her travels, Green wasn’t sure, and she mopped her face and her ample pink cleavage with a big, red polka–dot scarf. As soon as the words were out, she laughed. “I mean, he’s probably off with his latest girlfriend and when he finds out I called the cops …”

Green let Sue Peters handle the interview so he could observe quietly from the sidelines. His involvement was unorthodox, to say the least, but all the other experienced investigators on the case were occupied elsewhere. He had sent Sullivan off to deal with Media Relations, Levesque was taking Marilyn’s statement, and Gibbs was back in the station, readying the paperwork for search warrants. Yet this case had so many tentacles that a tight rein and a thorough knowledge of it were essential.

“Better to be safe than sorry,” Peters told Donna. “When did you last hear from him?”

“Last Friday morning sometime.” She paused and scrunched up her face. “Maybe noon. I’d slept in. He came into the bedroom to say goodbye, said he was heading overseas to Budapest to meet with some investors. I can never keep up with his business and frankly I don’t care. Money doesn’t interest me,” her eyes twinkled, “unless I’m spending it. But he was supposed to be back in time for a big meeting here a couple of days ago and he never showed up. Never called or emailed. I’ve tried his cell, our kids have tried, his business partner has tried. No answer. It falls on deaf ears.”

“What makes you think something is wrong?”

“Well, if it were just me, I’d say yeah, okay, we don’t have the greatest marriage right now and he’s always liked the ladies. I know for a fact when he travels he’s got his regulars on his route.” She shrugged and fanned herself with a pudgy hand that sported rings on every finger.

“I knew that going in, years ago. He just wanted a wife to give him kids, hot meals, and a nice house. I was handy. I’m no prize …” She shot Green an oblique smile. “Unless you want a lot to grab on to. I was getting past my best-before date. Hell, I never had a best-before date. I think he knew I wouldn’t ask too many questions.”

Beneath her dimpled grin, her expression grew sad and she stared at her hands. At her wedding band, which was plain and modest compared to the flashy rocks on her other fingers.

“What seems different this time?” Peters asked, in a surprisingly subtle tone for her.

“Because even if he didn’t phone me, he’d never ignore the kids. He’s crazy about them. A boy and a girl, twelve and ten. Impressionable ages, you know? And he wouldn’t screw up a business deal. He likes money way too much to turn his back on a chance.”

“So there’s been no communication with him since he left six days ago? No phone calls, no email, no texts? Nothing on social media?”

She was shaking her head. “Nothing. And he refuses to go on Facebook.”

Green leaned forward, curious. Fortunately Peters herself caught the lead. “Any reason?”

“Invasion of privacy, he says. He doesn’t want the kids on it either.”

“I notice the phone is in your name. Does he have his own line?”

“He has a BlackBerry he uses for business. But he wanted to keep our personal phone at home separate.”

Peters asked for the cellphone number and jotted it down. “That’s the number his partner gave us. Once we get a warrant, the records will tell us about any recent activity, any calls made or received, and from where. What about other devices? Tablets, computers?”

“He does everything on his laptop, but he took that with him.”

“What’s his email address?”

Donna supplied that, but balked at the password, claiming he’d always kept it secret from her.

“We can get it,” Peters said. She seemed to sense Donna’s discomfort, because she switched gears. “The evening before he left, where was he? Did he go out?”

She hesitated. Twisted her rings again. “I was out. Bingo.” A shy smile sneaked across her face. “My guilty pleasure, once a month with my girlfriends. He was supposed to be home with the kids.”

“Was he?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t like it when I get nosy. Suspicious.”

Peters jotted a few notes. Privately, Green doubted whether twelve-year-olds would even notice if their father went out. “Tell me about the day he left,” she said finally. “Was it a planned trip?”

“No. Actually it was a lie. There was no trip and his company didn’t know anything about a trip. He just packed a bag, took his passport like he was going, climbed in his car and took off.”

“He took his car? Does he usually take it when he goes overseas?”

She shrugged. “That was the first fishy thing. Usually he’d take a taxi to the airport. Cheaper, unless it’s just an overnighter.”

Peters made another note. “What was the second fishy thing?”

“You mean besides him not calling the kids? He’d been acting weird lately. Jumpy. He doesn’t confide in me — you probably got that clue if you’re any kind of detective — but he told me not to answer the phone unless I knew who it was. Said it was money troubles.”

“When did this start?”

“About three or four days before he left?”

“Is there any unusual activity in your bank account? Any big debts or big withdrawals recently?”

“Big debts, always. But Erik handles all that. I don’t pay much attention. My credit card still works, if that means anything.”

“Can you access your accounts online?”

Donna held up her jewelled hands in surrender. “Oh no. Never want to touch that stuff. I’d spend it all!”

“We’d like to look at his bank records too,” Peters said. “That will tell us if he’s made any transactions recently and from where.”

“Oh right, like
CSI
. Boy, all this stuff, it’s like nobody has any secrets anymore, do they.” A small frown of uneasiness puckered her brow. “He’s really going to kill me. He’s such a privacy nut.”

“All this is routine in Missing Persons cases, Ms. Zionti. Everyone leaves electronic footprints nowadays, and they’ll help us find him and make sure he’s okay.”

She still looked uneasy. “And if he doesn’t want to be found?”

“We find him, we verify he’s safe, and we respect his privacy.”

Her lower lip wobbled slightly and she looked away. “To be honest, now that I’ve talked about it, it seems silly. I guess I’ve been kind of worrying because of all this stuff in the news. About that Rosten guy, and the Carmichael house burning down. He’s never really gotten over that experience, you know? Not that he talks about it, but it’s like he’s always looking over his shoulder.” She bent down to gather her things. “But it’s more likely some pissed-off husband is coming after him with a shotgun. Either that, or this time he actually found true love. Maybe both. Maybe that’s why he’s laying low.”

“Do you have any idea who the woman might be?”

“No clue. Like I said, we were never much for talking. I suppose in his own way he figured he was sparing me. But …” She looked up, hesitating. “That’s another thing. He did get a call. I think it might be someone from the past. I overheard him saying something about it being a long time. Then he shut his office door on me.”

A random, far-fetched thought occurred to Green out of the percolating recesses of the case. He leaned toward the woman, trying to be casual. “Ms. Zionti, has the thought ever crossed your mind — even for a moment, from something he said or did — that maybe his lovers were men?”

Donna Zionti didn’t recoil in indignation as he’d expected. Her eyes narrowed, and she was just opening her mouth to protest when a sharp knock sounded on the interview room door. Sullivan stuck his head in. His ruddy face shone with excitement.

“You’re going to want to hear this.”

It was all the disruption Donna needed. She collected her purse and stood up to leave. Green stopped her with a quick hand. “Your information could be very important, Ms. Zionti, and we appreciate your co-operation. Detective Peters here will just take a few more minutes with you to complete the Missing Persons paperwork.”