The Taken (26 page)

She crumpled the note. “Jesus. She knows when I’m going to take a piss, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. Get me Wingate.”

He appeared in her office a moment later. “Was that Ray Greene?”

“Don’t suffer future pain,” she said. “I want you to call your people again.”

“My people?” He watched her, noting how upset she seemed. “What did Ray tell you?”

“He congratulated me for being up the creek with a paddle.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ray.”

“That’s not exactly what he said. But it did trigger a thought for me. I think we’ve been squinting our eyes a little too much. We should have seen this clearly a long time ago.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The mannequin in Gannon Lake? The story in the paper … the body in the tarp? We’re looking for a drowning, James.”

He thought about it for a moment. “We might be, yeah.”

“Twenty-one has most of the waterfront, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. And the harbour as well as the Islands.”

“It could fit. I want to be there first thing in the morning.” She looked at the laptop on her desk, and the site was still dark. For the first time in a week, she closed the computer. “Call your people and set it up,” she said.

The huge stone and glass building that was Twenty-one Division occupied half a city block between John and Simcoe streets on Richmond Street West. Its jurisdiction was tiny: only six square kilometres of downtown, plus the waterfront and the Toronto Islands, and yet it served a population of over three hundred thousand residents and another two thousand transients. A baseball or hockey game could increase its catchment by ten percent. It went out on over fifteen thousand calls in an average year, fielded two hundred and thirty officers and twenty detectives, and was justifiably proud of its clearance rate.

Detective Constable James Wingate hadn’t passed through Twenty-one’s glass doors in almost a year. Since his leave, he’d been in and out of the building in his dreams, but not in the real world. The prospect of entering it again was not one he’d
entertained since moving to Port Dundas (a rare out-of-force transfer), and as he and Hazel pulled in behind the building, he felt a fist clenching in his guts. He pulled his OPS cap down hard over his eyes and walked behind her as she went around the front of the building, but keeping his head down and staying in her shadow could not lessen the pull the place had on him. He felt, all of a moment, as if the last six months of his life – months in which he thought he might even heal – had never happened and someone had snapped their fingers to bring him out of his trance.

“James?” She was standing now a few paces in front of him, looking at him. He hadn’t realized he’d stopped in his traces. “What’s going on?”

“Smog,” he said. “Makes me dizzy.”

“Well, get out of it, then,” she said. She strode up to the doors and held them open for him. “The air’ll be better in here.”

“I guess.”

“Think anyone will remember you?”

“I doubt it,” he said.

They were inside a bright atrium. “These are your old stomping grounds,” she said. “Lead on.”

They crossed the floor toward the intake desk, where a sergeant was talking to a young woman. The sergeant offered Hazel his flat, all-purpose gaze and then returned to the woman in front of him. “He’s got a permit for the street, Ma’am?” he said, and she agreed that “he” did.

“But he’s my
ex
,
”
she said. “He doesn’t even
live
in this part of town. What does it sound like to you?”

“It sounds like he enjoys parking on your street.”

“Doesn’t he have to live on the street to get a permit?”

The sergeant stared dully at the sheet. “You have a point.”

“Thank
you.”

“But unfortunately, unless he tries to enter your property, this is a job for City Hall.”

“What?”

“Parking office. If his permit isn’t valid, they’re going to have to deal with it.”

“But –”

“Next,” he said, and he turned his face to the OPS officers. He offered them an expression that said he’d heard everything, many times, and that all of it bored him, bored him to
death
, and here was your chance to change all that, to tell him something new. He looked back and forth between them, staring dully at their uniforms as if he were looking right through them. “You two selling cookies?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Hazel said, trying to start off on the right foot, “you want chocolate or vanilla?”

“I like funny people,” he said, his mouth making a line as straight as a knifeblade.

Wingate stepped forward. “Hi, Carl. We’re here for DC Toles.”

“Oh, hey there, Jimmy.” It was as if Wingate had just stepped out for a coffee, not left the force a year ago. “He expecting you?”

“Yeah.”

“All right then,” said the sergeant named Carl. He picked up his phone. It had at least fifty buttons on it. “Detective? I’ve got a couple OPS here at the front desk.” He listened for a moment and then laughed. “Okay then.” He hung up and his face reverted to its deadened expression. “The newbie’s coming out to get you.”

Hazel nodded. Wingate was slowly trolling the posters on the wall opposite. What was it with him? Was it this hard to be back in his old division? She’d have to ask him about it later.

“You want to know why I laughed?”

It was Carl talking to her. “Sure,” she said.

“Detective Toles asked me if you were dropping breadcrumbs behind you.”

“That’s funny.”

“That’s why I laughed,” he said. “Toles’s going to fit in here just fine.”

“How new is he?”

“He’s still wearing the coat hanger his jacket came on.”

A door behind the sergeant’s desk opened and they got a glimpse of the busy squad room behind: men and women walking around half in a hurry, cops leaning over computers, cops talking on phones. The man who came through was tall and held himself so he extended to his full height. He wore square black-framed glasses over brown eyes and looked more like an art director than a detective. Then the door closed behind him and it was strangely quiet again. He came over and shook hands. “Danny Toles,” he said. He chucked his chin in the sergeant’s direction. “Carl tell you any good ones?”

“A couple,” said Hazel.

Toles led them through a door at the end of the foyer and down a hallway to a set of stairs. Twenty-one seemed bigger inside than it did from outside. Every person she passed, sitting in either an office or a cubicle, seemed busier than any one of her people. The interior of the building was a din of human voices, a multitude of doors opening and closing, phones ringing, laughter.

The sound of the phones reminded Hazel of what was in her pocket. They’d stopped, as the message had told them to, at A & R Electronics, one of the newer stores in the chain of big box stores that continued to spring up behind the town. She gave her name and the man behind the counter passed her a box in a bag. It was a “Mike,” he explained: a closed-circuit radiophone. Not much call for them, he said, what with all the newfangled cellphones. She took it reluctantly and turned it on: it was the second handheld talking device she’d been bought in less than a year, and the first one was rotting in a landfill somewhere now. The little window glowed dully in her hand and she’d left it on ever since, but no one had called.

Toles led them up a flight of stairs to the second floor, which was given over to meeting rooms and evidence rooms, various offices and lounges. Hazel presumed the cells were in the basement. “Thank you for setting this up,” said Hazel. “I know you folks must be busy.”

“Usually with this kind of request, we just fax the particulars, but since you’re not sure what you’re looking for, you’re going to have to let your fingers do the walking.” He unlocked a door with a small window in it and let them go in in front of him. The plaque on the door said
Room 32
. There was a table already stacked with files.

“Wow,” said Hazel.

Toles said, “I pulled everything we had for January to August 2002. Accidents, suicides, unusual circumstances.”

“How many?” asked Wingate, looking at the table.

“Our division, forty-one for the period. Citywide, just over a hundred.”

“Good lord,” said Hazel. “That many?”

“Those are just the sure unnaturals. Three hundred times that number of people died in the period in the GTA alone, and surely you could set aside another twenty as ‘maybes.’ Someone helping Granny over the last obstacle, you know?”

They’d decided not to tell Toles that they were looking for a drowning. But with a hundred bodies to go through, there were surely more than just a handful of floaters. Hazel was beginning to see the size of their task. They moved to the table to take the two chairs that had been provided. “Here they are,” Toles said, which seemed an odd thing to say when he’d already shown them the files, but she realized he wasn’t talking to them. A shadow had appeared in the door. A whip-thin black man with intelligent eyes and long hands stood there with his fingers laced in front of him. Wingate stiffened.

“DC Wingate,” the man said.

“Superintendent Ilunga.”

“Change of heart?”

“No, Sir.”

“Too bad.” The man stared at Wingate, then lifted a hand and stroked the tip of his nose with his forefinger. “You just going to stand behind that chair like you’re about to train a lion?”

“No, no,” said Wingate, starting forward. He offered his hand, but instead of taking it, the superintendent gripped Wingate on the shoulder and pulled him into a hug. Hazel saw the look on the man’s face and it surprised her: his officious bluster hid a heavy heart.

“Welcome back whatever the reason,” he said. He released Wingate and offered Hazel his hand. “Peter Ilunga,” he said.

“Superintendent.”

He held her hand a beat too long; the gesture silently asserted his control. “I gather you two are here to find something we missed.”

“It’s not like that,” said Hazel.

“Yes it is.” He smiled easily. “Just be careful and remember we live and die here by our clearance rate. If you’re going to move something from one side of the ledger to the other, you better be sure.”

“I understand.”

He turned to Wingate. “Does she?”

“We do, Sir.”

“Detective Constable Toles is
eager
to be out on the streets detectiving,” he said, shooting the new dick a friendly look, “but he’s here to be of
service
to you. However, at the first sign that you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, we turn back into a fortress and the two of you can return to fining people who have too many trout in their coolers.”

“Understood,” said Hazel.

At last, Superintendent Ilunga stood aside and gestured to Toles to leave. “Then the room is yours.” Toles left and Ilunga, leaning in to close the door, said to Wingate, “Come and see me when you’re done here, will you? You know the way.”

“I do.”

“Good luck,” he called over his shoulder.

Toles had left a handwritten key to the files on the table. It said, “Blue=suicide; Brown=death by misadventure; Purple =anything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Purple usually=bad smell. ½ get reactivated w/in a year, get solved, other half are black holes. Good luck.”

“Okay,” said Hazel to Wingate. “Maybe we should begin with the blues?”

“Sounds about right,” said Wingate.

Hazel separated out the blue files and placed the pile between them. “What was that with Superintendent Ilunga?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Come on, James. He held you like a long-lost son. You should have seen his face.”

Wingate took the top folder off the pile and opened it in front of him. It told the story of a subway suicide. “Yeah, that,” he said.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know, Skip. It’s a long story.”

“Maybe later, then.”

“Yeah,” he said, “later.” He closed the file and pushed it to one side. “Subway. Don’t look at the pictures.”

“I won’t.” She opened the next one. “Jumped from a window.”

They started rifling the piles faster. “Sleeping pills.”

“Same here.”

“Hanged himself.” He turned one of the scene-of-crime pictures on its side. “That’s disgusting. How could anyone do this to themselves?”

“I hear it goes wrong most of the time,” Hazel said.

“Well, not this one. He about tore his own head off.”

“Thanks, James.”

They continued through the files, shaking their heads and muttering causes: razors, guns, overdoses, bridges. Carbon monoxide, suicide by car, by cop. Even within the litany of
despairing deaths, there were those that stood out: one man had beaten himself to death with a hammer (his fingerprints were all over the handle and forensics determined the blows to his forehead had come from waist-height), and in another case, a girl of ten had stabbed herself in the stomach with a kitchen knife. The autopsy report in that file revealed a twenty-week fetus inside the girl. There had been three drownings as well: these they set aside.

They moved on to the “death-by-misadventure” pile: there were stories here as horrifying as those in the blue pile, reports on people who’d bumbled their way off the planet. At least half of the files involved cars: people in them, people under them. It never stopped amazing Hazel the different ways people could screw up their relationship to a machine weighing a ton and a half. In these files they found the boating accidents as well: crashes and drownings. They added five more files to the watery-grave pile.

In the undefineds they found the electrocutions, the accidental falls, the unwitnessed deaths that forensics failed to solve. Here there were no drownings at all, drownings, by definition, being less mysterious than a man who turns up behind an after-hours gambling den, face up, eyes open, and dead as a nail, as one of the files reported. The SOC pictures in that folder were particularly surreal: a man lying on his back staring up at the stars.

So they had eight drownings between January 1 and August 31, 2002. They laid them out in a row and stared at them. Three men, five women. They set the men aside. Hazel held up one of the women; she’d come out of the “misadventure” pile. “Janis
died in her bathtub,” she said, spreading two photographs on the table between them. They were colour pictures that showed clearly the gradations of colour on the woman’s swollen face. “That strikes me as a real challenge, don’t you think?”