The Ambitious City (15 page)

“Can your men check all the garbage bins on campus, especially those near the roads? I’m looking for anything that looks suspicious. Del Bianco knows how to reach me if you find anything. And lastly, please ask the young men who found Nam to speak to Del when they get back from the hospital.”

“Sure thing,” James said, reaching for his two-way.

Turning to the young officer, MacNeice said, “I want to know if they saw a motorcycle parked up here today, yesterday or anytime in the past week or so.”

“Will do. You think he might’ve been scouting the trail?”

“He knew exactly where she’d be, so yes, I do.”

MacNeice negotiated the steep trail at the far corner of the lot down to the path below, where there was still a lot of activity. He counted twelve uniforms, six on either side of her fall line. They were moving slowly down the incline, clinging to ropes that had been tethered to the larger trees bordering the higher and lower paths. The course of Lea’s fall was clear. Dried leaves that had rested undisturbed for years had been gouged out of their slumber, and freshly broken branches and flattened bushes also defined her path. Just short of a twenty-foot vertical drop was the tree that had stopped her.

He walked over to two Tyvek kids who were on their knees concentrating on the spot where she had left the path. They were casting
two clear footprints that likely belonged to the attacker. Seeing MacNeice, the older of the two said, “Hiking boots or maybe work-boots. We’ll find out.”

“Any idea how he got away?”

“Same way you came, sir—that path at the end. We found the same shoe print.”

“Good work. Anything else?”

“Ghosh’s BlackBerry. Why do you think he dumped it?”

“Because he knew we’d find it.” What he didn’t say was that the killer of Taaraa Ghosh wanted them to know this was his work too. MacNeice looked at the cops picking their way downward, looking more concerned about not falling than with finding anything. He walked back along the path, stepping over roots that rose out of the hardened dirt like knuckles laid bare on a forgotten battlefield. The attacker had left the trail, cutting an angle up to the vertical path, which was where they’d found the second boot print. MacNeice knelt down and studied the path he’d taken through the bush to connect with the path going up to the parking lot. He tried to imagine whether the man was panicking as he fled. There were no broken branches, and the leaves on the ground were more or less undisturbed.
He cut through just to be efficient
, MacNeice thought.
Not panicked
.

Suddenly behind him someone screamed, “Shit!” The officer at the top of the nearest ropeline had tripped and was falling. He knocked the legs out from under one of the female officers, and both began tumbling towards the next cop, who braced himself as the two ploughed into him. He sagged backwards but didn’t give way. The two unscrambled themselves and with great effort regained their hold on the line.

MacNeice called down, “That officer’s name, please.”

Someone yelled back, “It was Nichol, sir. Constable Martin Nichol.”

“Worthy of a citation, Nichol. Also, get your name on the tug-of-war team for the competition with Detroit.”

“He’s captain of the team, sir,” someone called back. There was laughing and razzing on both sides of the line of Lea Nam’s fall.

In the division parking lot MacNeice parked as he often did, close to the treeline, far away from the building. He opened the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of a male cardinal he’d heard calling for days. Turning to a new page in his notebook, he jotted down what he knew about the slasher. He wasn’t far into it when he changed tactics and wrote:
What connects a Bangladeshi-Canadian nursing student to a Korean-Canadian university athlete? Both high-achieving women, visible minorities, attacked in daylight in somewhat isolated settings. Only one cryptic swastika
. He was certain as he scanned the treeline for the bird that Nam would have suffered the same fate as Ghosh had she not fallen.
Fascist xenophobia—in Dundurn?
While there may have been closet neo-Nazis in the city, he wasn’t aware of any recorded incident where they’d been cited.
Why now, why here? Who’s next?
He underlined the last question.

A flash of red flew past the Chevy and landed on a branch of serviceberry. After sending its rippling call into the thick evening air, the cardinal lifted a wing and set about preening underneath it. Admiring the flame-red bird, MacNeice wrote down what he thought might be the opening line of a poem he’d get around to writing on a rainy day:
A drop of blood on a cardinal’s wing may not be seen …
His mind freewheeling, MacNeice remembered Lea Nam’s groggy reference to her attacker being all in black, with a black bubblehead. He forgot about the poem and wrote:
He’s wearing black so their blood can’t be seen. Is he wearing the helmet to hide or to terrorize?

MacNeice put the notebook in his jacket pocket, closed the
windows and got out of the car. Before walking away, he looked up again at the cardinal. The bird’s head swivelled towards him and, perceiving no threat, it lifted its other wing and went on preening.

Montile Williams was transcribing the day’s interviews when MacNeice appeared in the cubicle. Ryan was flying through video footage with his special pattern-recognition program and only looked up to say, “The emergency ward’s a Ghosh goldmine, sir. I’ll have a lot to show you tomorrow.”

MacNeice listened to five of the interviews Williams had recorded with the hospital staff, many of them sobbing as they spoke. And that wasn’t solely because of her murder—they had been horrified to see the photograph of her corpse on the Internet.

Much of what they said had already been reported: they loved her. In each interview Williams had asked if they knew or had seen or heard of anyone at the hospital having a problem or confrontation with Nurse Ghosh, even the slightest of disagreements. In the last interview a doctor in the critical care unit said, “Look, everyone here, if asked that question about anyone else—including me—could probably fill your recorder with stories about what assholes their co-workers can be—but not Ghosh. As politically incorrect as it might be, a few of us nicknamed her Taaraa Gandhi.”

As MacNeice looked up, Williams was nodding, as if to say,
What am I supposed to do with that?
“I’ve got eight more interviews booked for tomorrow, but I’m willing to bet they’ll all be like these.”

MacNeice started transcribing the observations from his notebook onto the whiteboard, about the similarities between the two women.

“Do you want me to switch to the Lea Nam case?”

“It’s the same case,” MacNeice said, looking back to the whiteboard, where a wire photo of Lea Nam accepting a gold medal had already been placed next to Ghosh. He glanced over to the second board, at Hughes in uniform, watching him, waiting. It was rare for MacNeice to feel cold, tiny shivers of panic. To the discovery of bone fragments in Cayuga, likely from the mutilated sergeant, and the fact that as of yet Bermuda Shorts had no identity, he added the certainty that Taaraa Ghosh and Lea Nam were just the beginning for the slasher. There were already more bodies than he had investigators, and he could feel both cases growing, mutating into something much larger.

Watching as MacNeice wrote on the boards, Williams said, “We’re gettin’ spread pretty thin, boss. You got any pull with that genie of yours?”

“Good question.”

Ryan swung around. “Once I’ve finished with the hospital footage, I’ll pitch in and research the couple in the Packard.”

“Great idea—do it.” He hadn’t given a thought to the other bay homicides and was happy that Ryan had offered.

MacNeice could hear someone coming down the hallway—Vertesi. When he turned into the cubicle, he opened an envelope and handed the photos of Hughes and his family to MacNeice, who taped them on the whiteboard. Then he sat down at his desk while Vertesi debriefed them on the visit with Hughes’s widow and his brief stopover at Old Soldiers.

“They made you,” MacNeice said.

“Oh, big time, no question—for all I know, before I even got out of my rental.” Vertesi stared at the whiteboards and sank lower in his chair. “God, another slasher attack. Missed his mark with this one … Did she give you anything?”

“Not much. He was wearing a black motorcycle helmet and he was fast with the blade, but she was faster and dodged the full stroke.”

Vertesi studied the image of Nam, then sat down, shaking his head as he surveyed the two boards.

“You really think Hughes was killed by bikers?” Williams asked.

“I’m almost certain he was killed in that barn,” MacNeice said.

“Judging by that family,” Vertesi said, looking at the photo of Hughes and his kids, “there’s no way he was a biker.” He shook his head. “Those guys had snakes, Harleys and girlie tattoos. Our man had a battalion logo and the names of his family.”

After a while the sound of Ryan’s machine whirring away in the background—white noise—peeled away the edges of the day, leaving all three deeply fatigued. MacNeice was about to stand up when his phone rang. He answered.

“Turnbull in Forensics, sir. We just finished the lab work on that fragment—it’s definitely human. We’ll need more time to determine its exact skeletal origin, but the thickness and integrity of it is consistent with the skull.”

“Thank you. Anything on the hedge trimmer?”

“The trimmer had been cleaned really well, probably with the pressure hose they have up there. No traces so far, but we’re still looking. Once we’re sure, I’ll take it to the coroner’s lab, cut open a coconut and compare that cut to the one on the corpse. You’ll receive outputs of those soon as we’re done. I’ll also take the fragment so Richardson can do a DNA match to your body.”

“Perfect. And the chairs?”

“One has deep abrasions on the underside and top of the seat consistent with chains restraining a bucking torso. There were similar scratches on the front legs. We’re using ultraviolet photomicrography to see if there’s any DNA caught in the grooves. There’s nothing on the chair back, but they probably used rope around his arms and chest.”

“Get the report over here as quickly as you can.” MacNeice hung up and went to the whiteboard. Below
Hughes
, he wrote:
Hughes
(likely) killed in the D2D barn, Cayuga. What was he doing there?

His phone rang again; it was Turnbull calling back. “Sorry, sir. On the Ghosh file, the oil stains from the mountain driveway and Wentworth Street North sites are from the same two-stroke motorcycle. We’re not finished yet, but the one that just came in from the university has the same broad characteristics. By morning we’ll have confirmation of that one for you.”

“Thank you, Turnbull.”

MacNeice went over to the second board and in red marker wrote:
Suspect rides a two-stroke motorcycle
. He studied the photos of Lea Nam with her gold medal and Taaraa Ghosh graduating from high school, then looked at Ghosh with her neck ripped open. He pictured the moment she had been confronted on the stairs by a stranger in black, wearing a black helmet and black visor. At first she would be confused, perhaps even angry …

“I’m done,” he said. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll go down to Dundurn General and speak to Lea Nam.” He picked up his jacket, said goodnight and started to leave.

“You won’t forget the genie, sir?” Williams called, turning back to his computer.

As MacNeice made the turn onto the winding road to the stone cottage, the man in the black helmet took over his thoughts. He tried to imagine what he might do next. Two women from visible minorities, one swastika. Would he attack a man next to show that he had the courage to do so, or would he continue to destroy young women, because they represented something. What? Procreation, perhaps—kill them and they couldn’t produce more people like them. Or was it sexual fulfillment, even though he hadn’t sexually molested either of them? Or was it that Ghosh and Nam were high-achieving women pursuing lives that were exemplary for both their sex and ethnicity—kill them and destroy hope? And what role did the police play in his scenario? Was he concerned at all about the
law, or was he convinced that the force was so inept he could continue to do as he pleased? Did he hear voices in his head, the devil talking, or God? Did he know that the time would come when it would end? Was this an elaborate and grotesque road to “suicide by cop”?

T
HE RAIN CAME
hard, hammering the pavement and sending up clouds of steam that wrapped around his ankles, making it appear that he was floating above Wentworth Street. Cars swerved away from the lonely figure standing on the white line; occasionally someone would yell at him or hit the horn as they sped by, up or down the hill. MacNeice ignored the traffic and focused again on the stairs leading up the mountain and on the ditch to the right. He could feel the water snaking down his spine under his shirt, feel his drenched pant legs sticking to his shins with each passing car or pickup.

He heard them coming long before they passed over his head—crows, cawing through the downpour, heading for the mountain. MacNeice raised his head, squinting through the rain as they glided to the railing of the landing where Taaraa had waited for her mother. The last flew so low that he could see it look down towards him, its beady black eye shining at him, the rain splashing off its oily wings. The crow came to light just ahead of MacNeice,
cranking its head sideways as if to better understand the man in the road. A truck came thundering down the mountain, its headlights catching the bird, casting its black shadow towards MacNeice. As the truck approached the crow, MacNeice thought to call out, but it was too late. The truck enveloped the bird and rumbled on past MacNeice, the rainwater slashing his legs. Unharmed, the crow turned and walked up the road, crossing to the mountain side before hopping down into the ditch where Taaraa Ghosh had died.

MacNeice wiped the water from his eyes and followed the crow. One by one the three birds that had perched on the railing lifted off and glided to the spot where the walking crow had gone. As MacNeice approached he could see them tearing at something. He paused before stepping forward: the crows were pulling at bloody strands of sinew that had been buried in the ground. Seeing MacNeice appear above the ditch, the walking crow squatted slightly, looking up at him with its beak open, revealing a bright red tongue. MacNeice expected a warning caw but heard only the splashing of the rain around him. He drew his service weapon, pointed it towards the skull of the bird and, at the last second, fired into the earth above it. Then he woke up.