Raw Bone (23 page)

“But I learned ‘forever’ can’t be measured in years when I got the call that Kate’s tests had come in and it was bad news. I felt the life being sucked out of me. The doctor was a family friend and he wanted to speak to me first so we could tell her together.”

Dylan’s head was down on his chest, and tears were sliding down his cheeks.

From that point, things went fast, MacNeice said. Days filled with waiting, days of chemotherapy that poisoned her and made her weak and angry and then just weak. He told Dylan how he’d looked for alternate treatments, plants, roots, Chinese herbs, and how each glimmer of hope was dashed by a further slide in her strength. Finally, she gave up.

“Kate was semi-conscious for two weeks before she died. When her breathing stopped, a tear fell into the hollow below her eye. I’ve never been religious, but I put my finger in the little
pooled tear as if it were holy water and touched it to my lips and my forehead. It was the last drop of her life left.”

“Harsh,” Dylan said under his breath, and wiped his face with his sleeve.

“What I know is, Kate died sure of my love for her. She left this world knowing we shared something worth a lifetime, and while it was cut short, she lives on in my experience of her.”

He could see that these ideas had gone over Dylan’s head, so he told him how close he felt to her when he visited her grave out in the country, how he’d speak—out loud—about the weather, the birds and chipmunks, the sky and the scuttling clouds, the amber sunsets, about his current passions in music, his joy in listening to her practise violin, especially when she didn’t know he was listening. “In those moments, to me she’s alive again, just sleeping.”

He told Dylan about the dreams, the ones that hovered over him like nightmares, where he was desperate to find her and couldn’t. He said things to the boy he’d never said to anyone. He was hoping Dylan would recognize something in it for himself. After all, rage and overwhelming grief had taken him into the furnace room. Those were emotions MacNeice knew well.

“I’ve been told, by men I grew up with, that I should move on,” MacNeice said. “That I should look ahead, not back—and there’s much to be said for doing so. But I’ve resolved to let nature guide me. You know, when you see a leaf floating down a stream, and you watch it and follow it, at some point it leaves the current and circles around before coming to stop on the bank. Eventually, it sinks to the bottom and joins the leaves that took the same journey years before.”

“Yeah … I’ve done that.”

“That’s me. I am a leaf swirling around now in a little eddy, not quite stopped, but no longer captive to the current.” MacNeice put his hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “Perhaps everything I’ve just said—or nothing—applies to you. But I want you to consider that not even death can alter the fact that your mother loved you.”

Dylan was looking down at his empty can and nodded slowly.

“So let me tell you about the proposition. Not surprisingly, it involves basketball and Bill Russell.” MacNeice waited until the boy turned to him. “It also involves a friend of mine, a guy who played basketball when he was your age, who loves the game as much as you do, and needs your help.”

The scent of patchouli preceded undercover officer Zeno Trakas down the corridor. Vertesi’s contact from Vice was every bit the sight that he was the smell. He wore a pale ochre suit with wide lapels, a Mediterranean blue silk shirt and a gold medallion hanging from a heavy gold chain around his neck. The medallion floated in a bed of black chest hair that rose all the way to his neck. Trakas rolled a toothpick with his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other as he enjoyed the wide-eyed stares of MacNeice, Williams and especially Aziz. Smiling at her, he lifted his massive eyebrows and said, “You like what you see, eh?”

“Detective, you are an … exotic.”

Suddenly the shtick dropped and Trakas said, “Enough of that. Okay if I sit?”

Vertesi pushed his chair toward him, and Trakas turned it so he could face all of them and settled in. He took the toothpick from his mouth and shoved it into his jacket pocket. Leaning over his legs like he was about to draw a diagram on the carpet, Trakas wiped away an imaginary speck from his cream-coloured leather shoes. “So you want to know about grenades? Who has them, how do you get them and who got one delivered to him in Dundurn?”

Vertesi said, “Exactly.”

Trakas’s beat was weapons traffic, mostly handguns, Uzis and assault rifles crossing the border at Fort Erie. His cover was an actual family connection in the port of Kalamata in southern Greece, through which many of the weapons coming from and going to the Middle East were smuggled. He smiled broadly, displaying a gold incisor. Noticing MacNeice’s reaction to
the tooth, he put his beefy fingers in and pulled it out. “Cap. No big deal.” He slipped it back in his jaw and winked at Aziz.

“Okay, so there’s BBT. Barry and his brother Shawn Bailey, twins out of Ithaca—that’s a Greek name, by the way—they hooked up with a kid from Dundurn, named Luther Tirelle, a Jam-Can who went down to Cornell on a full scholarship.”

“Football?” Williams asked.

“Stereotyping, detective.” He made a tsk-tsk sound through his teeth. “Luther went to Cornell on a business scholarship, but dropped out after second year because he wasn’t learning anything.”

“Meaning he was a lousy student.”

Trakas shook his head at the absurdity of such clichés coming from a black man. “No, Luther had the highest scores in his class, and his profs were grooming him for big things in business. Instead, he founded Bailey and Bailey and Tirelle—BBT—but that means something else on the street … Anybody?”

“Bacon, bacon and tomato?” Williams said.

Trakas didn’t take the bait. He looked up at Vertesi and over to Aziz, who both looked back, then swung his head toward MacNeice.

“Big Bang Theory,” MacNeice said.

“Exactamundo. If I had a cigar, sir, it would be yours.”

Trakas told them that Tirelle’s mission with Big Bang Theory was to supply the Canadian side of the border with superior quality and reasonably priced weaponry for all occasions.

“The money goes south, the weapons come north, and the gangs of the Golden Horseshoe hit the streets evenly weaponized, because they were all buying from the same supplier—BBT.”

Trakas cast a look around the cubicle to make sure they were keeping up with him. “Now, to the grenade in question. Grenades are an infinitesimal part of BBT’s business, there’s just not that much demand. This one took out two people. Interestingly, Luther is as upset about that as we are. I got him on the phone right after I heard a grenade had exploded in Gage Park. I reminded him that not one incident of gangs and grenades had ever been recorded. And that now, especially with the death of that cop, everyone was going to bear down on the border, thinking the gangs are going crazy.”

Vertesi looked up from his notebook. “What if it was a Canadian grenade?”

Trakas dropped his head, took a deep breath and said, “It wasn’t. I can tell you the military base it came from, south of the forty-ninth. And here’s some news: it wasn’t one grenade, it was two. Luther sold the two grenades to one customer for five K. Which is a deal, ’cause one goes for three K. So why the deal, you might ask?”

“I’m asking,” Williams said.

“Luther knew the guy who bought them and gave him a family discount. Get this: Luther says this client has no connection to gangs, the Mob or terrorists. Luther won’t tell me who it is—he’s certain the cop was an accident, by the way—but he’s still pissed at the guy.”

“Where’s Tirelle now?” MacNeice asked.

“He’s nowhere you’re interested in.”

“He’s an accessory to murder. If he’s here or even in the States, why not arrest him?”

“With all due respect, sir, stick to homicide. We’re taking down the cross-border shoppers, and we know pretty much—with this exception—what’s coming in and we’re getting better at tracking where it goes. I need Luther Tirelle and the Bailey boys just where they are.
Luther’s in the mountains of Jamaica and he doesn’t need to come back to run his part of BBT. He does it all online.”

Trakas stood up, shook everyone’s hand, hiked up his collar and then paused at the exit of the cubicle to say, “That smell?” He inhaled deeply. “For you, at least, it’ll fade.”

He smiled—in character again—took the toothpick out of his jacket pocket, slid it between his lips and followed Vertesi to the exit.

MacNeice went into the corridor and opened a window as Williams raced to the other side of the office, where he opened another. Aziz took a small hand sanitizer from her briefcase and doused her hands with it, rubbing them together as if she had come in contact with an infected alien.

When Vertesi came back, MacNeice was writing “BBT” on the whiteboard. The young detective smelled his chair before deciding it was safe to sit down.

Aziz gave him the hand sanitizer. MacNeice added the name Luther Tirelle and a question mark on the board. “Let’s find out where Tirelle went to high school.”

“Already on that, sir,” Ryan said. Thirty seconds later: “Geez Louise. Here’s his graduation photo, and can you guess where it’s from?”

“Our Lady of Mercy High,” MacNeice answered.

“Exactamundo! Sorry, sir, I couldn’t resist, but yes, Tirelle’s a 2002 Mercy grad.” Ryan clicked several times, then summarized what he’d found: “Luther Tirelle, twenty-seven, grew up in Dundurn, Ontario. He lived with his mother, then, after she went back to Kingston, Jamaica—no reason given—he moved in with his grandmother, who stayed on in Dundurn until 2009, when she moved to Oakville, Ontario, to live in a home by the lake—purchased for her most
likely by her grandson. His ambition in high school? Win a Nobel Prize for business innovation in the new economy.”

“Like that’s going to happen,” Vertesi quipped.

“Not so fast, wasn’t Nobel into explosives,” Williams said.

MacNeice said he was interested to know if there were any extracurriculars mentioned during his years at Mercy. The only thing Ryan could find online was noted below his name; it simply read, “Go Panthers Go.”

“So Tirelle is another reason for you two to get over to the school,” MacNeice said. Vertesi and Williams nodded as they picked up their raincoats.

The vice-principal, Celestine Brion, welcomed Vertesi and Williams into her office. Haitian by birth, she still spoke with a soft, lilting Creole accent. Guiding them to two chairs placed in front of her desk, she sat down herself and folded her hands together on top of a red file on the desktop. “This has been devastating for all of us at Mercy,” she said, “not only because of what happened to our colleague, but because of Dylan. He told his coach and his teammates that his mother was the body that was found … It’s unspeakable.” Coffee arrived, carried in on a tray by the school secretary, and Brion opened the door of her credenza to retrieve a package of chocolate biscuits. “They’re from Montreal, baked near where I grew up. They make coffee taste especially good.” Both detectives took their biscuits and their coffee—black, no sugar—and sat like students before her. The coffee and treats were enjoyed as if time wasn’t an issue. After Brion cleared the cups, she said, “That’s the way all meetings should begin, no?” She sat behind her desk, put her hands together again and said, “I’ve only worked here for three years, but Mr. Westbrooke has been principal for fifteen. He wanted me to tell you that he will answer any questions you might have that I can’t help you with.”

“Ms. Brion,” Vertesi began.

“Detective, we’ve shared coffee and Creole wafers. I think you can call me Celestine.”

“Thank you. We have two missions today, Celestine. One, as I mentioned when I called, is to review the first and last names of the faculty and staff. If we feel it will be helpful, we’ll
want to interview anyone of interest. But we also need any information you or Mr. Westbrooke can give us on a former student, Luther Tirelle. He left for Cornell on a scholarship in 2002.”

“Oh my, a sports scholarship?”

Williams raised his eyebrows and glanced toward Vertesi.

“No, actually it was a business scholarship,” Vertesi said. “We’d like to speak to anyone who may recall Tirelle, any teachers he was close to.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“No … just that Mr. Tirelle may be able to assist us in our investigation.”

“Well, here’s the easy part.” Brion opened the red folder and retrieved the stack of paper inside, which she placed in front of them. “These are all the names of male staff at Mercy since 2000 with the initial
S
, either in their first or last name. Quite a few of them are no longer teaching here. I’ve provided additional anecdotal information and anything else I thought might be useful. For example,” she reached across and with a red fingernail pointed to the entry for Harvey Sharp. “Mr. Sharp is in a wheelchair.”

With the vice-principal’s help, Vertesi and Williams soon eliminated seven of the ten male staff: two of them were too short to have been the bomber, another had only been teaching for a year, Mr. Sangha because he was South Asian and Mr. Singleton because he was Trinidadian, Mr. Sharp because of the wheelchair and one had died of lung cancer. Of the remaining three, two were over six feet, but one of those, the shop teacher Sam Madden, weighed roughly three hundred pounds and walked with a pronounced limp. Unlikely. Both of the remaining
S
candidates had been at the school for at least ten years: Steve Bernard, Mercy’s religious studies teacher, who graduated from a seminary but didn’t enter the priesthood, and an English teacher, Mr. Swinton.

Something in the way the vice-principal spoke Swinton’s name caught Williams’s ear. “Tell us about Mr. Swinton.”

“Well, we don’t discuss these things, obviously, and he has never said anything, but I believe our Mr. Swinton is a bachelor by choice.”

“Are you saying Swinton’s gay?”

“Well, he’s a
very
committed bachelor.”

“You mean he’s a womanizer?” Vertesi asked.

“Well, the opposite, really,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “I’m going to go ask the principal to join us.”