The Calling (30 page)

'Thank you.'

'Don't wake me before ten tomorrow!'

Her mother hung up, and Hazel put the phone
down on the console between the seats. Her
mother, drunk with her pals on a Friday night.
When am I going to learn how to live? she thought.

The cold wind outside the car drove the snow into
the headlights and went rustling through the tops
of the trees. The branches whipped in sudden
frenzies and gusts of snow exploded off the
branches where it had settled. Then everything
would come to stillness briefly. They'd sat silently
for nearly another hour watching the occasional
traffic move past slowly as well as a few nightbirds
taking their dogs out for a last walk before turning
in. It was nearly midnight; there had been no word
from inside the house nor from the roving cars nor
the men stationed on the rooftops since eleven.
The radio silence was spooky. Even with a half a
Valium inside her, Hazel Micallef was wide awake.
She kept as still as she could in the driver's seat;
any shifting sent shivers of pain down into her leg.
The Valium made it feel as if it didn't matter, but
she knew from experience that as soon as she stood
up, she'd get a full dose of something else. In a
matter of minutes this would all be over and she
could move on to the next part of her life. In three
weeks' time, she'd undergo a test even her GP
warned her was 'unpleasant'. A CT myelogram. A
spinal tap to fill her spine with ink, followed by a
scan. Nothing else would be as definitive: after the
test, they'd know if it was the knife for her or not.

Midnight came and went. 'Christ,' said Spere,
rousing himself. 'What if he doesn't show?'

'He'll show,' she said. 'He's going to prove to us
he can do it.' She keyed the radio quietly.
'Maintain positions.' She got a 'copy' from Wingate
and from Fairview across the road from the Batten
house.

'What's the chance he's changed cars?' said
Spere. 'Are we sure the officers on point are going
to see him coming?'

'They're just the first line of defence. He'll
probably get through. But when he does, he won't
be out of the car long before we're on top of him.'

'Are you shooting?'

'If he so much as tilts his head, yes.'

They sat in the cold for another forty minutes
and watched the snow coming down. It was blowing
past in more than two directions, a soft chaos.
At one-fifteen, Wingate radioed her. 'I'm sorry,
Skip. But the mother's getting pretty anxious in
here.'

'Did she take a pill?'

'I think we'd need an elephant tranquilizer at
this point.'

'Keep her calm,' said Hazel, but as she was speaking
another voice broke in, saying
please advise
.
'Who is this?' she called. 'I
do not
copy—'

'A car—' came Fairview's voice, breaking up,
over the radio.

'God, he's there,' said Spere.

'—in front of the house—'

'Who has him?' There was a flurry of voices:
Glencoe and one of the officers inside the house by
the name of Shepherd.

'Shepherd, if you're at a window, get away from
it. Glencoe?'

'Here—'

'You have a clear shot?'

'It's not the right car—'

'He could have changed cars!' shouted Spere
into the handset.

'He's getting out,' said Glencoe. 'I repeat, I have
a suspect going up the walk. Rick, you got him?'

The other shooter came on. 'I can see him, but
he's yours, Glencoe.'

Spere was already out of the car, shouting toward
the houses. 'Take a shot, goddammit!'

'Howard!' she called after him, but he was
already in the street, the snow closing around him.
'Goddammit! I need an ID!' hissed Hazel into her
radio. 'You know what this guy is supposed to look
like—'

'Shoot your fucking guns!' shouted Spere from
the road.

'It's not him – it's a kid,' said Fairview, 'a
teenager. He's carrying something.' They listened
to the officer scrabbling across the roof to a new
location. 'Positions inside the house—'

'We're ready,' came Wingate's voice.

'This isn't our guy—'

They heard a shot fired, and Hazel threw the car
door open and sprang from the car. 'Man down!'
shouted Glencoe, and she was in the road, sprinting.
She hit the verge on the other side and
something low in her back twanged and she went
to the ground as if she'd been shot. Spere heard
her shout and rushed back to her. 'Help me up—'

'Can you walk?'

'Goddammit,' she roared as he lifted her from
the road. 'Is this fucking week ever going to end?
Go! Let's go!'

He took off ahead of her and, willing herself to
move through the pain, Hazel took off after them.
They rounded the corner and already they could
hear shouts from the house. Wingate and the three
other officers were flying out of the house and three
of the roving cruisers had fishtailed onto the street
from two different directions. There was a pile of
three men on top of the suspect, and he was
screaming in agony. They all arrived at the same
instant, and Hazel dragged the cops off the kid.
He'd been shot through the thigh and he was roiling
on the ground, a star of dark-red blood soaking
the snow. She could see all the porchlights going
on up and down the street. 'Who are you?' she
shouted, falling on him and turning him face-up.
'Who are you!'

'Oh God! God!'

'Who are you!'

'Danny! My name's Danny!'

A frightened thought rushed across her mind,
and Hazel lifted herself off their suspect. 'Is anyone
still watching the house?' The men looked back
and forth over her. 'For Christ's sake, someone get
into that bedroom!' There was a sudden shudder and
the small crowd of officers flew apart. She returned
her attention to the kid on the ground beneath her.
'What are you doing here? Who sent you?'

'I come from Bond Head,' he said. The tears
were pouring down his cheeks. 'I been five hours in
shitty weather, lady.'

'
Why
.'

'A guy paid me a hundred dollars to deliver a
letter.' The thing he'd been holding was lying
in the snow ten feet away, where it had landed after
the kid had been knocked flying by the officers
in the house. It was a small, white envelope. She
could see from where she was that her name was on
it, in a tight, black script. 'I swear to God!'

She pushed up, willing herself to stand. The kid
rolled into a ball, moaning. One of the men inside
the house returned to the front door with both
Rose and Terry. 'I want the whole perimeter of the
house staked out. You've shown your faces now, so
just make sure no one gets within five hundred
metres of this place.' She'd been hearing doors
opening and closing; in a matter of moments,
they'd have a crowd. 'Keep people away from here!'
she shouted to the officers in the cruisers.

'What's happening?' said Terry.

Hazel limped across the lawn, waving Wingate's
hand off, and leaned down to pick up the small
envelope. It weighed almost nothing. She'd left her
gloves in the car and already her hands were beginning
to freeze.

'Don't touch that, Hazel,' Howard Spere said.

'It's for me,' she said, panting for air. She put a
fingertip under the edge of the flap and tore the
envelope open. Her heart was pounding. She
pinched the sides of the envelope and looked
inside. There was a single, stiff piece of paper
within. She drew it out and instantly dropped it
into the snow, as if it had burst into flame at her
touch.

'
My God
—'

'What is it!' called Spere from ten feet away.

She fell to her knees. Instantly, her people were
around her, their voices rising in fear. In the snow,
a plasticized little square lay on its face, its black
back shining up like a piece of slate. Wingate
kneeled beside her, his arm around her shoulders,
but she couldn't speak. 'Skip? Hazel ... what is it?'

'A Polaroid,' she murmured.

He reached down in front of her and turned it
over. A wave of light moved over its surface.

'That's my house,' she said, taking it out of his
hand. 'That's a picture of my house.'

* * *

She said goodbye to her daughter, put the phone
back on its hook, and came out cradling three
glasses between her hands. Clara came down the
hall with a strange look on her face.

'It's not Paula,' she said.

'Oh for God's sake.'

'It's a man looking for Hazel.'

'All right, just a moment everyone,' Emily said,
and she put down the last glass and wiped her
fingertips on the front of her pants. 'I'll go see what
he—' she started to say, but before she could finish,
Clara Lyon's face had disappeared in a spray of
blood and bone. Clara fell back as if in a faint and,
stepping around her, holding up a steel mallet
drenched in gore, was a man in a long black coat.
The whites of his eyes glowed a pale yellow and his
skin hung from his skull as if it were dripping from
the bone.

'Emily Micallef?' he said. She stared at him in
mute terror. The man stepped to her. 'I am Simon
of Aramea.'

Saturday 27 November, 4 a.m.

At the age of six, she'd lost her mother in a supermarket.
Once a month, her mother would drive
down to Mayfair to the big grocery store and Hazel
would be allowed to push the cart up and down the
aisles. She was old enough to read the prices on the
little red stickers and already quick with numbers,
and Emily gave her the task of choosing the least
expensive brand of julienned green beans, or to
calculate how much two sirloin steaks would cost.
In her head, Hazel could see the numbers coming
together, could hold the ones apart in her mind as
she added the tens first. If, during this monthly outing,
she was particularly useful or clever, her
mother would buy her a barley-sugar sucker at the
checkout, or even allow her to choose a cake for
after supper.

They'd been in the aisle with the rice and dry
beans and at the end of the aisle, turning toward
the dairy section, Hazel realized that she had been
following a woman wearing the same coat as her
mother. She turned and went back down the
direction she'd come, but her mother was not
there. Neither was she in either of the aisles on
either side, nor in the frozen foods section, nor at
the meat counter. Hazel stopped at the front of the
store, where the pyramids of tuna and washing
powder stood before the cashiers, and she recalled
(now, as her entire complement of officers
assembled at the station house in the middle of the
night) that it was dark through the high windows
at the front of the store, storm clouds had gathered,
and she was afraid. But she did not want to call out
or ask an adult for help because she thought if she
did her mother would never reappear. What
she feared most would become real. She clutched
the cart's handle and began to search up and
down the aisles in an orderly fashion even as a grip
of terror tightened in her belly. At last she found
her, at the very back of the store, inspecting a
carton of eggs. She was picking each one out,
turning it over and replacing it in its cardboard
cup. Hazel rolled the cart up to her. 'How many
eggs is a dozen and a half?' her mother had asked
her, and Hazel told her eighteen. 'Did you find
what you were looking for?'

'Yes,' said Hazel.

'Then let's pay,' said her mother. To her, Hazel
had not been missing at all, and perhaps the entire
episode had lasted less than two minutes. But Hazel
had never forgotten the terror of thinking her
mother had vanished.

The overnight duty officers were Sergeant
MacDonald, and constables Forbes and Windemere.
Wingate had called the station house from the
road, roaring back along the 121 with Hazel
paralyzed in the passenger seat, telling the three
officers that all hands were needed immediately,
and when they arrived, all but PC Jenner and
Sergeant Costamides were there. The moment
Hazel passed through the doors, Forbes, Ashton
and Windemere were given orders to hit the major
highways west, north and south, and MacDonald
and Wilton were to take unmarked cars and scour
the side streets for suspicious activity of any kind in
Port Dundas, Hoxley and Hillschurch.

She stood in the pen in front of the rest of them
and she knew her fear was naked. She could not
muster at this moment what it would take to hide
her torment from these people. Clara Lyon's body
was on its way down to Mayfair. They had called
Clara's daughter in Toronto, who was beginning
the long drive north in a state of choking horror.
Simon had herded Emily's three remaining guests –
Grace Hughes, Margaret Entwhistle and Sally
Eaton – into the garden shed and locked them
there in their evening clothes. All three were in
hospital suffering from hypothermia and there was
some doubt that Mrs Entwhistle, already fragile
with rheumatoid arthritis, was going to make it to
morning.

By the time the sun was coming up, they'd heard
from all of the officers on patrol and there was
nothing. In each of their voices, Hazel could hear
the exhausted panic of having no time to succeed.
There were no sightings of the car they believed
Simon was driving, or reports of accidents, or untoward
incidents of any kind. A call to Equifax
established that Simon Mallick had two credit
cards and a savings account, but he'd not made use
of any of it in the preceding twelve hours. In fact,
there had been no activity at all in any of his
accounts since before the spring. In the station
house, five constables had ceaselessly been dialling
motels, inns, gas stations and all-night variety
stores within three hundred kilometres to collect
fax numbers; a hastily thrown-together description
of Simon, Emily Micallef and the car was faxed out.
If there was no fax machine, verbals were given.
The entire place was roiling, but Hazel knew in the
deepest part of herself that the Belladonna would
not be tripped up now. It was possible her mother
was already dead, and that her killer had gone to
ground. Grace Hughes was the only one of the
three elderly ladies who was capable of talking to
them: Kraut Fraser had gone to the hospital to
interview her. She'd given the description of a man
of skin and bone. She'd heard the vertebrae in his
back grinding when he moved. He'd smelled to her
of Juicy Fruit gum, she'd said, but underneath the
sweetness, there was a scent of rotting meat. She
told Fraser she was certain he was going to
kill them all, but when he'd closed the shed door
on them, he'd looked upon them all kindly and
wished them a good night.

'Juicy Fruit is ketones,' said Spere. He'd asked if he
could speak to her in her office. 'He's starving himself.
It comes from the breakdown of fat reserves.
And if he wasn't crazy when he left Vancouver
Island, you can bet he is now. If an old lady can smell
ketones on this guy, then he's practically digesting his
own body, including his brain.'

'So this means my mother's dead or alive,
Howard?' she snapped.

'I'm just trying to give you a picture of the guy,'
said Spere. 'What his state of mind might be.'

Some of the overnighters had gone home at
6 a.m. to sleep for a few hours, and now they were
coming back in, and some of the others were heading
out, but reluctantly. All night long, it had felt
to her like the place was shaking, as if they were on
a ship in rough seas. It was no calmer now that daylight
had come.

She'd tried to avoid being in her office since
arriving back in Port Dundas at 3 a.m. She hadn't
wanted to see her desk, her phone, her chair, or any
part of this room in which she'd failed to foresee
the kind of upending Simon Mallick had plotted
for them all. The room stank of her disastrous lack
of foresight. She'd known he wasn't stupid, and yet
she'd proceeded, in the thrall of what she thought
of as her last hope, to try to trap him. And he had
mocked her by striking at her very heart.

She was aware that Howard Spere was staring at
her with a tilted head. 'You okay?' he asked.

'What?'

'We were talking and you sort of zoned out.
Maybe you should let one of your people take you
home for a couple of hours.'

'No,' she said. 'I won't be going home until this
is ... settled.' She drew the palm of her hand down
over her face, as if to scour herself awake. 'Whatever
you might think of this man's state of mind, Howard,
it's at least as sharp as ours, and we've only been up
one night. This guy's been living rough for two
months, and from the sound of him, he's firing on all
cylinders with no fuel at all. So we're not going to use
the word crazy about him to anyone.'

'Okay,' he said, looking down.

'Why did you ask me in here, Howard?'

'Oh. Well, I thought you'd want to know that
Margaret Entwhistle has died.'

'Give me something, people! Who has news? Who
knows anything?' She was standing, hands on her
hips, and she'd startled them by flying into the pen
already shouting. Some of them put down their
phone receivers or pens and turned to her, flicking
glances at one another. They were already doing
everything they could. 'Come on!' Hazel shouted.
'We don't have a week to put a goddamned case
together!'

Sergeant Renald took a chance and stood to read
something from his daybook. 'Report of a break-in
at a pharmacy at Seymour Lake.'

'Okay!' she said, stepping forward. Seymour Lake
was ninety minutes southwest of Port Dundas.
'Any surveillance tape?'

'Chief, this is a town of fourteen hundred people.
There's probably a single camcorder there, you
know?'

'Fine,' she said. She was faintly aware of
Wingate's presence beside her. 'What was taken?'

Renald consulted his notes again. 'Uh, a shelf of
adult diapers and also some chewable vitamins.'

She was nodding. 'Great. That's our lead? He's
incontinent and fighting
fucking scurvy
!?'

'Hazel,' said Wingate quietly.

'This is the ex-mayor of our town. This is my
mother. Can you people get your heads on straight
and figure out where this guy is? Who haven't you
called? Where does he think we won't be looking?
Look
there
! Have you thought of that?'

'Skip,' said Wingate.

'What?' He walked back into the hallway and
her guts flipped. 'What is it!'

'It's nothing,' he said, 'nothing about anything.'

'Then what?'

'Don't you think you should go home? Rest up a
bit? This could go on for a while.'

'Did Spere send you over to tell me that?'

'No,' he said. 'I don't need Detective Spere to
tell me you need a break.'

'What am I going to do at home, James?'

'These people need to focus.'

She pushed past him, a caged animal. 'Would
you go home, James?'

He had to admit he wouldn't. But he wanted to
give her a chance to decide for herself to leave. An
officer driving Ian Mason up from Barrie had
radioed from the road: they'd be there in half an
hour.

By mid-morning Terry Batten had filed suit against
the OPS for reckless endangerment. She and Rose
were in Mayfair, having insisted that Central put
them up somewhere safe while she thought about
their options. She had already decided that the
house in Humber Cottage would have to be sold:
they would not live in that town, she'd told Mason,
not in a house marked by a killer. She'd filed a
second suit for mental anguish naming just Hazel.
She and her lawyer were working on other charges.

Mason parked in the rear and sent in one of his
men to ask Hazel to come talk to him outside. He
told her he was sorry about her mother and that all
the resources of OPS Central Division were being
brought to bear on finding her. He reassured her
that the abduction of her mother was
not
being
treated as any other missing persons case: all available
personnel as far south as Barrie were on it.
Mason spoke to her with more respect and warmth
than she'd ever seen coming from him, so she knew
it was going to be bad. He asked for her badge. 'I
can't do that,' she said.

He turned his gaze to the two large police
constables standing beside the car they'd driven
him up in. 'You can have a radio,' he said. 'You'll
hear what we hear in real time. But you can't be at
the station house now, Hazel.'

'You're going to need a judge.'

He produced an envelope and held it up. 'I
thought you might say something like that. I don't
actually need anyone to take you off the job. But
I've got a warrant for your arrest if I need it. You
want to open it?'

'Arrest for what? I'm being sued. It's not illegal to
be sued.'

'Trespass is illegal, Hazel. You're relieved of duty,
and so as of this moment, you're trespassing.'

'You're a piece of work, Ian.' He noticed the men
and women standing in the hallway behind the
glass door that led to the parking lot. She turned
and looked. 'Do you really think they're going to
let your two drug-squad bruisers jam me into the
back of a car and drive me home?'

Mason gestured to the small mob to come join
them, and they pushed through the door into the
cold sunshine of midmorning. He pushed up on his
toes to see to the back of the crowd. 'Which one of
you is Jim Windgate?'

He stepped forward under Hazel's steady gaze. 'Et
tu, Wingate?'

He offered her a miserable look. 'He's going to
move the investigation to Mayfair and put Spere in
charge of it if you don't go.' Mason offered the
young detective his hand. Wingate looked at it as
if he were being asked to sign on the dotted line.

'Take it,' said Mason, and Wingate did.
'Congrats, you're the new interim CO.'

'Um,' said Wingate.

'Look everyone,' Mason said to the officers,
'Detective Inspector Micallef has to take a break
from active duty, but I know you'll all be reassuring
her that you're going to carry on in her
temporary
absence under the capable direction of Sergeant
Windgate—'

'Detective Constable Wingate,' said Wingate.

'Yes,' said Mason, 'and that everything here will
proceed as per the instructions you've been given.'

An unhappy murmur from the gathered officers.
Wingate turned to them. 'I'm sorry, everyone, I
don't like it any more than you do. Anyone who
can't work under this arrangement should say so
now, no prejudice. Otherwise, everyone back to
their desks. There's a woman's life at stake.'

'There you go,' said Mason, and he was grinning
at her. 'It's like you were never here.'

'I'll take my own car, you son of a bitch.'

Her people were filing inside with backward
glances. 'It's not
your
car, Hazel. It's the detachment's.'
One of his men opened the back door of
Mason's cruiser. 'Constables Erwitt and Atget will
be more than happy to get you home.'

She began to move to the car. Mason made a
sound behind her, and she turned to him.