Raw Bone (25 page)

“So he hoped to be pure … as pure as a bookmaker could be,” MacNeice said.

Byrne nodded. “Then, in the middle of December, I think, Anni told Duggie she was leaving here on New Year’s Day to join her friend out west. Something about going to see California, and then home. That hit Duggie hard, and he told me he was forced to expand his business—fast. He wanted to build his fortune so he could pop the question before she left, and then he’d go home with her to Norway if she said yes. It was insane.”

“But surely she would have told him from the start that her job was temporary and she was leaving,” Aziz said.

“I suppose so. It was always a race with time for Duggie, him saving money and hoping she’d stay longer.”

“She didn’t know what his business was?” Aziz asked, with some disbelief.

“No clue.”

“Was he running bets in your bar too?” MacNeice asked.

“Yeah … but you’ve seen my customers. He wouldn’t get more than a twenty outta them, and only when their pension or welfare cheques came in.”

“So how did he expand?”

“He wouldn’t tell me exactly. Then, I don’t know what happened, whether it was one of them mucky-mucks at the club or somewhere else, but he ran into trouble. All he would say is that somebody wanted to put him out of business. But he wouldn’t stop. I asked him how much cash he’d stashed away. He looks me straight in the eye and says $137,214, mostly in one
hundred dollar bills. He figured $200,000 would impress Anni’s father—that was his magic number. I knew then that he was in trouble.”

“And why’s that?” Aziz asked.

“For him to pull down those numbers, we’re not talking twenty-dollar bets with toothless geezers over a pint; it’s coming out of someone else’s very large pocket. Whether they were winning or losing, the clients all knew Duggie was winning. So who was taking their bets before this wild Irish boy shows up? Whoever it was, those fellas musta known their own profits were down. As Duggie was getting more ambitious, he was robbing the boys who’d been working Dundurn all their shrewd bookie lives.”

MacNeice’s cell burped. He glanced down at the text message that had arrived from Ryan: “Canada Coil and Wire president is Paul Zetter. Number of employees: three.”

“So when did you last see Duguald Langan?” Aziz asked.

“Christmas Eve. That night, Duggie winks at me and says he has an important date, to pop the question to Anniken. He left here at seven p.m. and never came back. When I went up to his room the next morning, the place had been cleaned out and he was gone.”

“But that’s not the end of the story, is it?” MacNeice said.

“For me it is. As far as I knew, he’d pulled it off, and Duggie and Anni were now living on some farm in faraway Norway. Until you came in asking questions about her. I don’t know what I thought, but I didn’t know Duggie was dead until you told me. Not even then could I really believe it, not till these terrible pictures hit the table.” Byrne couldn’t bring himself to look at them again.

“Who used your boat?”

“Duggie had the keys because he was going to haul it out for the winter. I don’t know who used it. I have another set of keys, but they never left my desk drawer, except when I pulled the boat out meself.”

“That man we passed at the door, who is he?”

“I’d already told ya. He comes in from time to time and pays cash for a pint and sometimes a meal.”

“So what is he, and why would he come here? Is he another ex-pat?”

“No, he’s a Scot. Glaswegian, I suspect.”

“So you’ve spoken to him?”

“Only in passin’, once or twice. It’s an easy accent to spot, and his is very thick.”

“And you really don’t know his name?”

Byrne paused, then said, “I think it could be Bishop, or something like.”

“And Paul Zetter?”

“Who is Paul Zetter?” Byrne looked at Aziz and back to MacNeice for an answer.

MacNeice said nothing, just collected the images, put them into the folder and into the briefcase. He stood up, took his coat from the back of the chair and put it on. Aziz also stood and put on her coat, sliding the notebook into the briefcase and then picking it up.

MacNeice went over to the window and peered out at the bay in the distance, his hands deep in his coat pockets. “Mr. Byrne, this meeting was the one chance you had to clear the air of lies and withheld truths, to put some distance between you and the incidents that ended with two people dead in the bay.” Turning away from the view, he walked to the door of the office, where he paused, then glanced back at Byrne. “Get a lawyer on board, fast. It only remains to be determined whether you’ll be charged with double homicide or as an accessory.”

For once, the smart-tongued barman had nothing to say.

Outside, it was grey, damp and cool, but for the moment, at least, it wasn’t raining. MacNeice lifted his collar and turned to Aziz. “I’ll drop you at Division. Ask Williams to pick up Melody Chapman in the morning and put her in the interview room. I’m going to try to get to Paul Zetter’s office before it closes.”

MacNeice made it to Canada Coil and Wire just after five p.m. The door wasn’t locked yet, but no one was at the reception desk in the empty lobby. Turning around, taking in the space, he could hear a male voice behind the closed door just to the rear of the front desk. He stood for a moment, looking at the framed photos on the lobby walls, featuring lake freighters and tractor-trailers, loaded with huge coils of blue steel.

The computer keyboard on the desk was spotless, as if it had just been taken out of the box. There was a leather desk pad, a vase with impossibly pink silk flowers, and a plastic tray with two ballpoint pens in it, both with “Canada Coil and Wire” printed on the shaft.

MacNeice walked to the door, knocked once and opened it. A middle-aged man was standing with his back to him, talking on a cellphone. He swung toward MacNeice, held the phone away from his ear and said, “Yeah, what do you want?”

Opening his jacket, MacNeice pulled out his ID, holding it up. “Are you Paul Zetter?”

The man put his hand up. “No, I’m Dave. Just a minute.” He told the person on the cell that he’d get right back to them, then said to MacNeice, “He’s not in—can I help you?”

His full name was Dave Francis, he said, and he was yard foreman, shipping clerk and shop manager. He was wearing overalls, a sweatshirt, a worn and oil-stained blue down vest, and steel-toed construction boots with the steel showing through a hole on the toe of the right boot.

“Mr. Zetter has gone home. Wanna leave a message with me?”

MacNeice said, “I’m actually looking for someone named Bishop. He’s a big man, likely Scottish-born?”

Francis scratched the stubble on his chin and said the name softly to himself, then shook his head. “What’s he got to do with Coil and Wire?”

“I was hoping you, or rather Mr. Zetter, could tell me.”

“You sure you got the right place, mister?”

“It’s Detective Superintendent MacNeice, not mister, and yes, I’m sure. I saw the man getting into a silver Mercedes SUV registered to this address.”

“Well, yes, Mr. Zetter drives one of those. I haven’t met any Scottish men around here, but I’m mostly down in the yard, managing shipments. You got a card or somethin’? I’ll make sure Mr. Z gets the message.”

“Tell Mr. Zetter I’m interested in speaking with him about this man as soon as possible.”

“I got that.”

By eleven that night, the Boogie Bin was hopping. Pink and blue laser lights strafed the crowd on the dance floor, ricocheting off the sweat of two hundred young men and women bumping and grinding to house music. In the middle of the floor, a big man had cleared a circle for himself and the tiny brunette who spun and shimmied in front of him.

The space around him wasn’t maintained because he was worshipped by the dancing mob. No one had ever seen him before. Just something about the big man made people steer clear of him. His dance partner’s instincts had shut down hours before, dulled by test-tube frozen blueberry vodka martinis. She didn’t appear to notice that, as her gyrations increased, the big man grew more rooted and still, moving half-time to the beat and then only by sagging one knee or the other.

The big man looked down at his pirouetting pixie, who was wearing a silver-sequined tank top and a cherry-red flared skirt that barely covered her bottom. Even with six-inch heels, she came only halfway up his rib cage. She was old enough to drink, but he realized that she appealed to him because she looked like a twelve-year-old. With that thought, he started smiling—though not so much that anyone sober would think him happy.

The big man was wearing a white cable-knit roll-collar sweater, black jeans and black cross-trainers. It wasn’t the uniform of the Boogie Bin—all about him, young men were wearing tight T-shirts soaked with sweat. Later in the night, he lifted the sweater over his head and tossed it high above the crowd, toward a table bordering the dance floor, where it knocked over a bottle
of wine, sending two men in black scrambling and laughing to get out of the way. The big man stuck a fist in the air and nodded toward them.

Bare-chested, he continued his slow, alternating knee-drop dance. Strictly speaking, he was violating a rule the club had posted just inside the entrance: “Nudity Strictly Prohibited.” But two of the bouncers, who had watched the sweater fly through the lasers to the table, decided to let this be the one time they’d make an exception.

Sweat streaked down a large blue horizontal rectangle with a pinkish-white
X
tattooed across his upper chest—St. Andrew’s Cross, the flag of Scotland. His bull-like back featured, in large, flourished script, the black-humoured Gaelic toast: “Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us. Damn few. An’ they’re a’ deid.” Centred on the deltoid of his right shoulder was the insignia of the British Special Air Service, with its wings, sword and suggestively sinister scroll: “Who Dares Wins.” Below it, like Scouts merit badges, were six words:

The DJ cranked up the rhythm, and all but one dancer jumped in unison, the floor sagging as the club’s retina-frying lasers doubled in frequency and intensity. Dry-ice fog flowed over the stage, oozed onto the floor and into the crowd, where it rose in frothy clouds to the level of the
dancers’ knees, then shoulders. Before long, the pretty pixie could only be seen by the ponytail on the top of her head, or by her slender arms when she raised them to touch the white cross on the big man’s chest.

With closing time climbing to a deafening climax, the
thump-thump-thump
was exacting a toll. Several couples bounced off each other and finally staggered, laughing, off the floor, but still the space around the big man held. Occasionally the girl’s hands would snake up his stomach, squeeze his nipples and run up the angles of the white cross to his neck—the extent of her reach.

A minute before closing, he lifted her up. He lifted her from her rib cage with all the effort it would take to pick up a newspaper. When her face was in front of his, he studied it. He leaned into her, inhaled her perfume and licked the sweat from her neck. On his tongue, the sharp taste of her sweat had a drying effect in his already dry mouth. He tilted his head and kissed her, easing his tongue between her lips and into her mouth, moving it about like someone reaching into a purse for loose change. She pulled away from him—then laughed. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she licked the sweat off the white cross and offered her mouth to his again.

Sherry Berryman’s roommate found her the next morning, naked, lying on her back in bed. Her head was turned so far to the left that her chin was tucked behind her shoulder. The duvet had been tossed to the floor, along with all but two of the pillows. At first the roommate thought Sherry hadn’t come home from the club the night before, but then she’d discovered her keys on the glass table next to the sofa, and her bag on the floor. She’d banged on the door to wake her
up for work, and when Sherry didn’t respond, she’d gone in. When MacNeice walked past the uniform at the door at 9:18 a.m., the young woman was sitting on the sofa, talking to Aziz.

He nodded for Aziz to carry on and stood looking around the living room. It was large and bright, with a kitchen and island to the left, and beyond, a dining room table with six chairs. The retrofitted office building featured an uninterrupted wall of windows on the north side. A police photographer in Tyvek stepped quietly out of the bedroom to his right and began setting up to shoot the living room, beginning with the bag and keys. He acknowledged MacNeice and then said, “Forensics is waiting for you in the bedroom, sir.”

It was a strange scene in a very pink room. Three members of the forensics team in their orange suits stood lined up at the foot of the bed, each with an instrument in hand. Apart from the bruising on her neck and the impossible turn of her head, the lovely young woman in front of them might have been sleeping and would soon wake up to wonder what these people were doing gawking at her naked in her own bed.

“Sir,” rippled down the line as he leaned over to study the girl’s face, which was turned toward the grey morning outside. He inhaled sharply. From brow to cheekbones, her eyes had been sealed with Scotch tape. The tape dispenser was on the nightstand. There was no sign of torture, let alone one great and final blow. There was a large hickey on her right breast below the nipple, and what looked like a bite mark beside her navel—surely the result of romantic lust, not an assault. Above her teardrop pubic hair was a tattoo of a bluebird in flight, its head tilted downward.

“Is this how she was found, exactly like this?” MacNeice asked.

“Exactly, sir. The roommate didn’t touch her and we were told to wait for you.”

“Has Richardson been called?”

“Yessir. She’s ready for her as soon as we’re finished here.”

He nodded and looked about the room. Clothing, likely from the night before, was scattered on the plush white carpet and draped over a pink velvet chair. MacNeice pulled on his gloves and picked up a shoe. Turning it over in his hands, he noted the scuffed satin surface. He lifted the discarded tank top, held it to his nose and inhaled a trace of perfume and the vague smell of sweat. There was a trio of photographs on the dresser: one of her on a beach with a girlfriend, another of her dancing with a young black man under a banner that touted Jamaican independence, and in the last one, she was in the centre of the shot, about to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Crowded around her were several young women all laughing and holding glasses of champagne, waiting to see if she could blow them out in one breath. One of them was the young woman now sobbing on the sofa with Aziz.