Raw Bone (22 page)

Williams stood up. “I’ve found something, boss. You want me to read it, or just give you the book? I’ve marked the pages with orange tabs.”

“It’s big,” Vertesi chipped in.

“Hand it to me,” MacNeice said, as he sat down wearily at his desk and put on the gloves. Williams carried the diary to him. Taking a deep and, he hoped, discreet breath, MacNeice opened it to the first tab.

Williams smiled grimly. “It’s November 22nd. She’s got less than a week to go. Two days later, he notices her calendar on the back of the door. He punished her for that even though she had stopped tracking the days: she didn’t have the strength. He refers to the punishment as being for ‘past sins.’ She dies four days later.”

MacNeice looked down again at the sickeningly neat script.

MacNeice looked at the Post-it hanging off that last sentence and then at Williams, who took the
diary back and laid it on the table. He pressed the palm of his hand on the closed book as if it would otherwise open of its own evil accord, then peeled off the latex gloves and set them down on top. “You don’t need to read any further, Mac. He never mentions ‘S’ again. She never speaks or even opens her eyes again. He keeps trying to feed her Ensure, but her system’s shutting down. I’m amazed she lasted that long.”

The day she died, Williams told them, Nicholson had exams and got to the house late. “After hosing her down, he put her in the wedding gown. He’d dug the pit over the previous two weeks after researching how to lay concrete in the Our Lady of Mercy school library. The equipment was all rented under his pseudonym, Christopher Marlowe. He paid cash.”

MacNeice looked at them all. “I want all first and last names beginning with
S
of the male teaching staff at Mercy, past and present, including the principal.”

The phone rang and Ryan picked up. Without even asking, he handed it to MacNeice. It was Sally Bourke-Stanford. “Dylan left his foster parents’ house early this morning through the bedroom window. He took a gym bag with all of his clothes.”

“Have you called his grandparents, or Grace Smylski? Her son, Tom, is Dylan’s best friend.

“Not yet—I just found out. His caseworker went to the school first, then called me to say he hadn’t shown up for class.”

“I’ll get an amber alert issued, and we’ll check the bus and train terminals and all roads out of Dundurn in case he decided to hitchhike somewhere.”

MacNeice ended the call, then said, “Aziz, give me the keys to the house on Tisdale, fast.”

He went alone, parking down the hill so the boy wouldn’t spot the Chevy and bolt. Before climbing the steps to the front door, he turned to see if Grace Smylski was watching—she wasn’t. A moment later he was easing the storm door open and sliding in the key. The heavy oak door gave way in a hush of stale air. Inside, he paused to look around the living room—nothing had been disturbed. The wood flooring creaked as he moved down the hallway. The door leading to the basement stairs was open. In the kitchen, there was a Dr Pepper on the table. He felt the can—it was empty but still cold.

MacNeice went back into the hall and listened for any sounds from the second floor. Hearing nothing, he made his way to the top of the basement stairs. He could see there was a light on. The stairs were hopeless—they squeaked with every footfall.

“Who’s that, who’s there?” Dylan’s voice.

“It’s me, Dylan. Mac. I’m coming down.”

“Haven’t you done enough? Get out of here.”

MacNeice stepped into the rec room. Dylan’s gym bag was on the floor by the sofa. The door to the furnace room was open. MacNeice crossed the room swiftly and there was the boy, standing on a three-legged footstool. He had a belt buckled around his neck and he was struggling to secure it to a hot water pipe. He wasn’t distracted from his task by MacNeice.

“Go away, detective. You’ve done your job. That’s it, isn’t it? Your job: find the bodies, find the killers and fuck the rest.”

“You need a hand with that?” MacNeice asked calmly.

“What? Oh yeah, like I’m some tool. I know you can stop me. But I will do it, I will.”

“I never said I wanted to stop you. Like you said, I’m the one who finds the bodies. You’re still alive.” He stood in front of Dylan, looking up at what he was trying to do. “I assume you’re using your dad’s belt—that’s poetic. Give it to me. I’ll tie it off at the bracket. That pipe’s too wide.” With some force he took the belt out of Dylan’s hands and looped it around the vertical bracket, pulling it tight to make sure it would hold. “You’re good to go,” he said.

There was now very little play in the belt, the noose forcing Dylan to stand on tiptoe, which made the stool even less steady. MacNeice backed off and leaned against the door frame.

“What are you doing?” Dylan’s face was contorted with anguish, and the pressure around his neck was painting his cheeks a dark red.

“I’m here to watch you go, if you’re determined to do this. You should at least have one friend.”

“You’re not my friend. Man, you think I’m crazy? You don’t care about me.”

“Okay, so at least I’ll be here to pull you down after it’s over. But for the record, I do care about you.”

“Well I don’t care about you!” The stool wobbled. To steady it, Dylan lifted his head so that he faced the ceiling, his feet flat on top of the stool.

“You do, though. That’s what’s difficult for both of us, Dylan. You do care about me. And I started caring about you the moment I saw that photo of you on the mantel upstairs—that and the wedding photo of your mom that you kept in your room.”

“Don’t talk about that.” He was crying now and began to gag.

“You’re going to choke to death that way too, Dylan. It’ll be quicker if you kick over that stool.” MacNeice stepped forward. “Here, I can do it for you.”

“Get back—get away from me.” The boy’s voice cracked and he went back up on tiptoe
to release the pressure on his throat so he could spit and swallow.

“Weird thing is, I actually had a proposition for you.”

Dylan couldn’t look directly at him, but he tried. His expression reminded MacNeice of a porcupine he’d seen caught in a leg trap—the mixture of fear and rage in its eyes—and it sickened him. He went back into the rec room and picked up one of the basketballs. He slammed it against the wall; it bounced back to him across the tiled floor and so he did it again—the noise was startlingly loud.

“What are you doing? Stop that. What do you want? Why are you here?”

Mac looked back into the furnace room. “Like I said, I had this proposition.”

“You were tricking me at Children’s Services, weren’t you? At least now, you should tell me the truth.”

MacNeice lobbed the ball back into the rec room. “No, Dylan, I believed every word of what I said. But if I had been through what you’ve been through, I wouldn’t believe me either. That was why I knew to come to the house. You wanted to finish it where it began, here in this house, across the street from Tom.”

“What do you mean?”

Dylan’s legs were shaking with a fatigue that ran up the whole of his body to his hands locked on the belt around his neck.

“You’ve lost everyone who loved you; and worse, you’ve figured there’ll be whispering and cheap shots in the hallways of Mercy High,” MacNeice said. “And that’s just the short term. You’ll never have a parent there to see you graduate, get married, have your own kids. Your whole idea of who your parents are is upside down and I can’t argue with that, because it’s true. But you’ve left Tom and your teammates out of the picture. They don’t strike me as cut-and-run
friends.”

“What do you know about them?”

“I know Tom is your best friend and that you’ve known him your whole life. I know, when it comes to basketball and life, good times or bad, win or lose, you will have each other’s back.”

“So?” He was sniffing, trying to keep the snot from running down into his throat.

“Let’s think about Tom for just a minute. First he’ll be angry you hanged yourself and that you didn’t confide in him—
your best friend
. But then he’ll begin feeling guilty that he was useless at helping you survive what you were going through and he’ll start blaming himself. The guilt will deepen and it’ll stay with him till his grave. But there’s no point in you feeling guilty about Tom feeling guilty. And maybe the biggest hurdle for Tom is his sense that you betrayed him when you didn’t turn to him. That’s his problem though, isn’t it?”

MacNeice walked back into the rec room and thumbed through a small stack of NBA game and highlight DVDs before calling, “I saw an empty Dr Pepper can upstairs. Are there any more of those?”

At first Dylan didn’t answer—maybe he was trying to figure out what MacNeice’s strategy was—but then he said, “There are two left.”

“You want one? I imagine you must be as thirsty as I am at this point.”

MacNeice went upstairs. He found the two Dr Peppers and a half-full package of Fig Newtons in the fridge. He took the cans and cookies, went back downstairs and settled on the sofa. “You still with me, Dylan?”

“You wouldn’t let me do this—they’d put you in jail.”

“Who’d know?” There was a pause and he heard the stool rocking. “I’ll just say I got here ten minutes too late.”

He put the Fig Newtons on top of a magazine, opened his drink and took a sip. Looking at the posters—LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin, Dirk Nowitzki and Chris Paul—he asked, “Why isn’t Bill Russell on your wall?”

Long pause, then Dylan asked, “Who’s he?”

“He was the Celtics centre who changed the game forever, I’m told.”

“I thought Shaq and Kareem did that.”

“Nope. I have it on good authority those two wouldn’t even have happened if the door hadn’t been blown open by Bill Russell.”

“Well, I don’t care anymore.”

“I look at these walls, the magazines, DVDs, the balls, the photo that was on the mantel and is likely now tucked in your bag, and I’d have to say I don’t agree. You do care. At your funeral, Tom Smylski will say that basketball was what you cared about most.” Then he added, in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could produce, “Basketball could save you now, Dylan.”

For close to three minutes the only sound was the intermittent rapid rocking of the stool and Dylan’s coughing and spitting. Soon, whether he wanted to anymore or not, the boy would hang because he couldn’t balance anymore.

“So what is your proposition?” Dylan struggled to say.

MacNeice took a long, deep breath, his eyes welling with relief.

“I refuse to speak to a man on a stool with a belt tied around his neck. Sorry, Dylan, but you need to come and hear me out. If you reject my idea, I promise you I’ll help you climb back up on that thing.”

“What’s the move in all this?”

“Only you and I are here, so what we say happened is what happened. If you accept my proposition, you’ll agree to at least outlive me and be the man I know your mother wanted you to be.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

“More than you, maybe more than her parents and certainly more than your father—all of which I’m willing to tell you.”

Another pause. “Okay.”

MacNeice went into the furnace room and unlashed the belt from the bracket. He helped the boy off the stool and undid the buckle from his neck, then dropped the belt on the floor. He held Dylan by the shoulders. “I know it took courage for you to agree to listen. The truth is that’s only a fraction of the courage you’ll need if you accept my deal.” He walked him to the sofa and handed him the last of the Dr Peppers.

“We’re going to talk about Bill Russell, about sacrifice, about competition and how that might save your life. But for the moment,” he said, “just enjoy your Dr P and the fact that you’re still breathing.” MacNeice clinked Dylan’s can with his, took a sip and swallowed. Then winced.

Dylan was studying the detective’s face. “Do you even like Dr Pepper?”

“Hate it.” He laughed. “What’s more, I don’t believe Pepper’s a doctor.” MacNeice sat back and waited for Dylan to recover a little.

“Would you really have let me do it?” Dylan nodded toward the furnace room.

“What do you think?”

“Sir, I think … you’re seriously weird.”

“That may be,” MacNeice conceded. “May I tell you about someone I loved who died a few years ago and the impact her death has had on me. You okay with that?”

“Sure … I guess.”

MacNeice began at the beginning, with his first sight of Kate, their first words, the first time their conversation wasn’t awkward, the first moment he admitted what had been true for him from the beginning: that he loved her and wanted to be with her forever.

He told Dylan about how he’d reduced his life to its simplest form: work and Kate. About how, in the years they were together, she’d opened him up to music, art, reading and travel, and how even though their lives were completely different before they’d met, they managed to fold themselves around each other. How, in time, Kate made him better than he was, more of a man than a cop, and how he didn’t really know what she saw in him, other than a potential that she alone could identify. Anytime he asked what it was exactly, she’d smile and touch his cheek, and suddenly the question didn’t matter. Life was good and complete.