The Ambitious City (22 page)

“Very funny, sir. Here we are.”

They stopped in front of a lab door with a long, slim window in it.

“Dr. Thomas is in her office, just to the left of the door. I’m going to get some munchies.” She smiled and walked back the way they had come.

Before opening the door, MacNeice peeked through the window to get a sense of the space. On the far wall there were large jars with specimens—of what he couldn’t tell—on oak shelves that rose from the floor to the ceiling. There were no windows but an overabundance of fluorescent light. In the middle of the room were several pieces of equipment that looked high-tech, most of it covered in clear plastic, and six computer stations that made him think Ryan would be very comfortable there. A cluster of students was busy at one station, and none appeared to notice him peering in. He could see at least three bouquets of flowers; they didn’t look store-bought but more as though they’d been cut from someone’s garden and dropped into various pieces of medical glassware.

He opened the door and stepped inside. Baroque music rose above the hum of equipment and air conditioning. He thought it was Handel but wasn’t sure.

Sheilagh Thomas was standing in her office with her back to the door, studying something in a large volume. Rising above the credenza in front of her was a bookcase that went up to the ceiling, and all of the books appeared to be immense. He looked back at the length of the lab. It ran for eighty feet or more and seemed to be broken into sections, or perhaps disciplines. At the far end was a row
of much larger equipment and in between were six stainless steel specimen tables, four of them occupied.

“Impressive, isn’t it,” Thomas said, coming out to meet him.

“I have no idea what I’m looking at, but yes, it is. The only things I recognize are the flowers and possibly the music—Handel?”

“Close. Henry Purcell. The flowers come from a farm near my house; most of them grow wild. In the absence of daylight and fresh air, it’s the best I can do for my students. Would you like a tour?”

“I would very much, but not now. I have to get back downtown.”

“We’re building a stack of rain checks greater than the annual rainfall in Dundurn, but I understand. Come in and we’ll get straight to it—but over a glass of wine, I insist. And sometime soon you’ll take me to dinner and I’ll show you that I have more in my wardrobe—well, admittedly not much more—than lumberjack shirts.”

He smiled, noticing that her linen summer shirt was indeed a red, grey and black plaid.

The clutter of her Land Rover was nothing compared to her desk. It was piled high with more huge leather-covered books, bound documents, large manila sleeves with X-rays in them and at least ten Styrofoam cups with unintelligible markings on them—mostly numbers and letters. At the far end of the credenza behind it were two wineglasses and a bottle of red wine sitting on a circular tray. Beyond it was a ceramic setter, its head held proud and high with a limp mallard between its jaws, marching out of some marsh cattails.

“Let me clear a space …” She picked up a stack of books and put them on the floor behind her desk. A green blotter covered her desk, and on it, nearest the telephone, were doodles—all of bones. She moved the Styrofoam cups to the opposite end of the credenza, next to the skull of a small animal. On the bare brick walls were anatomical drawings that looked centuries old and a framed photograph—he guessed from the 1920s—of an elegant young woman
standing next to a large stone fireplace, holding a pipe to her lips as she lit it with a stick from the fire.

“My grandmother. Something of a rebel.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Quite.” She went on to say that the family had money, position and power, but her grandmother left it all shortly after that photograph was taken and moved to Kenya to be a nurse. She stayed there till the Second World War and returned just in time to treat the wounded returning from Dieppe. Many were Canadians, of course.”

“Was she the one who inspired you?”

“Very much so, yes. Even when she was in her eighties, I would go over and sit by that fireplace as she told me stories and smoked her pipe.”

“Did she ever marry?”

“No. She’d had an affair with someone during the war who was killed in France. She died without revealing who he was. My mother was the product of that affair.”

“Tragic, and probably not uncommon,” MacNeice said, and she nodded.

The lab door opened behind him and Andrea appeared with a large plastic bowl filled with what looked like potato chips. She placed it on the desk. “They’re organic sweet potato as well as parsnip chips sprinkled with sea salt—we’re crazy about them. Hope you like them, Detective.” She looked over at Dr. Thomas and asked, “Need anything else?”

“No, thank you, Andrea, that’s lovely. We’ll be out shortly.”

Handing MacNeice the wine, she said, “A surprisingly lovely Pinot Noir from Niagara. Chin-chin. Sit down for a moment, Mac.”

He did, but even as he toasted her and sipped his wine, he was worrying that he needed to be gone, and he knew that she could see his mind was elsewhere. She set her own glass down.

“Well, let’s get down to it. Harry and Arthur. The scrapings we took from the concrete and the bones suggest they were dumped together, in 1928 or ’29. We started modelling the faces on the computer and noticed straightaway that the modelling wireframes were interesting.”

“In what respect?”

“The cheekbones. It seemed like a wild guess, but we said aboriginal.”

“Local?”

“We think so. One of my post-docs noticed a similarity in the cheekbones and jaw to the painting of Joseph Brant—a Mohawk—that hangs in the common room. Then we had a breakthrough; hence my call and this rather decent Pinot. I can tell you for a certainty that they both died in 1929 and both had served in World War One.”

“How did you determine that?”

“We did a chemical scan of their leg, arm and rib bones, and in one of the column fragments there was a shred of flesh stuck to the concrete where a hand had been. In each scan we found a trace chemical that we’ve now identified as mustard gas. These men were both in the trenches.”

“That means we may be able to track them through Veterans Affairs.”

“You could, but you won’t have to. We know who they are.” She popped a chip into her mouth, crunched, then smiled triumphantly. “Andrea went through all the missing-person mentions in the
Standard
for 1928 and ’29. On March 31, 1929, there was a small article mentioning two Indian high-riggers who had failed to show up at work for a week and whose belongings were still in the Barton Hotel room they had rented by the month. What made it newsworthy wasn’t that they’d gone missing—that wasn’t uncommon at the time—it was that both had been decorated for
valour during the second Battle of Ypres.”

“Ypres Salient … where the Germans first used mustard gas.”

“Very good, MacNeice. These two were cousins on their mother’s side, Charlie Maracle and George Marshall. They were both awarded medals of valour—Charlie a Military Cross, and George the Military Medal and bar. We haven’t researched for descendants yet … Care for a bit more wine?”

“No thanks, but I definitely wouldn’t call it plonk.”

“Come along, then, the stars of our molecular anthropology lab, led by Andrea and a couple of the undergrads, are going to present what they discovered when they extracted genetic material from the bones of Charlie and George.”

Halfway down the lab a laptop was connected to a projector that lit the white concrete blocks of the exterior wall. The students had gathered around, waiting for the two of them to appear. Further on, the skeletal remains of Charlie and George were also waiting, on the stainless steel tables. On cue, someone killed the fluorescents.

The show was lucid, precise, thorough and thrilling: it felt as though the students were opening a time capsule. The chemical analysis was dense but comprehensible, and the animated reconstruction of the damaged skull was magical, but that was just the beginning. Using National Archives photographs taken at the time of the young men’s medal honours, Andrea and her colleagues had skilfully employed a computer modelling program called Tracer to morph the young men’s faces onto their skulls. Noses, jaws, eye orbits, foreheads—everything fit into place. The skeletons had been placed on a metric grid, photographed from above and morphed onto images of the uniformed soldiers to confirm that they matched in body type. Charlie was six feet, George five foot nine. Finally, they presented the
Standard
’s “Indian Heroes Missing” article, highlighting a paragraph that read in part: “Both men were respected high-riggers on the city’s
tallest tower—Dundurn’s amazingly modern Pigott Building—and outspoken advocates for establishing a union to protect high-riggers’ rights.”

The Chevy moved with the traffic down Main, a steel bubble filled to overflowing with Ellington’s “Solitude.” He parked on the far side of the lot and watched a pair of dark-eyed juncos trading places on a serviceberry tree. For no reason he could identify, he remembered his father, a master of Celtic gloom, standing on the dock on a hot day in August thinking about winter and telling him that the days were getting shorter and by how many seconds.

His cellphone rang as he reached the door. “What is it?” he asked.

“Just got an email, came in to the division server,” Wiliams said. “You close?”

I
T WAS SENT
from a house laptop at an Internet café called WebWORX, near the university.
Saw your press conference. Know your man. Ask a demographer
. Signed
X-Dem
.

“I’ve pulled up the organizations in Dundurn that do demographic research,” Aziz said. “Apart from the university, there are only two in the city.”

“You think it’s the slasher talking to us through email?” Williams asked.

“No, our man has an agenda,” MacNeice said. “I’m not certain what it is exactly, but this would be tempting fate.”

“I think you’re right.” Aziz glanced down at her watch. “Though all that may change in forty minutes from now.”

“What are the names of the firms?” MacNeice asked. For just this minute he didn’t want to think about Fiza tempting fate.

“Accudem Associates Limited and Braithwaite Demography Incorporated, both in the west end,” Aziz said. “Shall we split up?”

“I was going to visit the Waterdown OPP detachment, give them
a heads-up that I’ll be interviewing one of their citizens—Sean McNamara.”

“Not just yet, Michael,” MacNeice said. “I’ve demanded search warrants to seize the financial records of ABC, Mancini and McNamara.”

“That’ll rattle some cages—especially Alberto’s. Pa tells me he’s tight with the mayor.” Vertesi was actually smiling.

“Someone hired muscle and paid for it. How they put that expense on their books will take some forensic accounting, but it probably wasn’t tucked away under ‘petty cash.’ While we’re waiting for those warrants, we can visit Accudem with photos of our suspect and his bike, and then we’ll go out to Braithwaite. But let’s stick around until Fiza does her press conference.”

Williams went over to Aziz’s desk and leaned against it, his brown eyes fixed on hers. “I’ve got another thought about our slasher,” he said. “Maybe you can use it.”

“I’m all ears,” Aziz said, smiling up at him.

Taking his cue, Williams began to pace, holding an imaginary microphone. “Okay, in grade nine we had a teacher, Miss Dodd, who did a variation on show-and-tell she called ‘Storytelling 101.’ Two months into the year, a kid named Georg—with no E on the end—joins our class. He was Hungarian, son of a guy connected with the Hungarian government somehow. For his first show-and-tell he brings this flag, all stained with blood. It was his grandfather’s, who had carried it during the 1956 uprising when he was killed. Fantastic stuff. Dried blood, almost brown—seriously cool to a ninth-grader.”

“Is there a point?” Vertesi asked.

“Lemme finish. So next time, Georg puts up his hand and gives his topic, which he says is ‘Public/Private.’ Miss Dodd’s all over this. He goes up to the front of the room, takes the teacher’s chair and stands on it. I’m in the front row, sitting next to Sophie Levy,
Chantal Davidson—a sister—and Judy Jamieson, the sweetest girls in the class.”

Williams had them all by now, even Ryan, still facing his computer but with his hands still and his head down, listening.

“Georg looks out at all of us. He’s got a sheet of paper full of typewritten notes. Dodd’s at the back of the room leaning against a bookshelf when Georg smiles, bends over like he’s bowing, then drops sweatpants and gotchies to his ankles and straightens up. His pecker is hanging six feet from Chantal’s face—”

“What the hell!” Vertesi exclaimed.

“Exactly. He starts to read this manifesto—all the world’s problems would be solved if we could see each other’s privates in public—but it’s hard to hear him because he’s drowned out by the girls, who are covering their mouths, laughing or screaming these horror-movie screams, and the guys yelling stupid shit from behind. Miss Dodd launches herself off the bookcase, hollerin’ something I can’t remember, and the bookcase topples over as she’s running between the desks, and Georg is reading somethin’ I can’t hear and everyone’s looking at his dick hanging there. Dodd slams into him and gets slapped in the face by it as she’s pullin’ up his sweatpants.

“Georg is as calm as can be—he just keeps reading. Somebody’s yellin’, ‘Ho-ly-shit-fuck-no-way!’ behind me and Dodd tears Georg off the chair, and it goes skidding across the floor and smashes a plaster bust of Shakespeare that was sitting like a shrine on the table by the window, and
wham
—they’re out the door and gone.”

“So what happened?”

“So, the paper he was reading from fell at my feet. There’s pande-fuckin’-monium breaking loose in the room and I’m sitting there reading this manifesto. He wanted us to understand that power comes from the groin—all subjugation, all violence, all rape, all of everything that’s evil. He had this whole thing mapped out.

At the end of it he was going to ask that we all stand up and take our clothes off—even Miss Dodd!”