“I do appreciate your help, sir. I just need your name and address for our records. Besides, I have to get your coat and gloves back to you.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. My name, it is Sylvio Torres, like the baseball manager, but with an ‘s,’ so no relation.” A joke he’d told many times before. He waited for my smile. “I live at 72 Mississauga Street West. That’s just a couple of blocks from the young lady. I’ve seen her when I’ve been walking Lily.” He suddenly put his hand to his eyes, pushing down tears.
“What on earth’s going to become of her poor child? I seen her too. She’s deaf as a post like her mother. What a tragedy.”
This was news to me. Leo had never even mentioned he had a granddaughter and I only knew about Deidre because he had a graduation picture of her on his desk. He was close-lipped in the office and, unlike a lot of us, didn’t share his personal life at all.
Mr. Torres was shaking his head. “Dreadful to have that handicap but not reason to take your own life, don’t you agree, ma’am?”
He obviously hadn’t seen the scarf around Deidre’s neck but I didn’t want to reveal anything more for now.
“You were in the park when Dr. Forgach and I arrived. It’s early to be walking your dog. Is that usual for you?”
I kept my voice casual, not wanting to alarm him any more than he was already. He blinked rapidly, holding his dog even tighter.
“No, not the usual. She had an upset tummy last night, a touch of the runs, so I thought I’d better get her out soon as possible. She hates it if she has an accident. Don’t you, Lily?”
The dog answered by licking his chin. I put out my hand, fingers tucked in, for her to sniff.
“She’s certainly a pretty one… Did you see anybody else in the park when you arrived? Any cars?”
“Nobody. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention mind you but no, I’d say there wasn’t anybody else here.”
Screaming sirens shredded the air and I saw an OPP car speeding down the street, a fire truck following close behind it. The patrol car raced down to the pier and pulled up by the bollards at the end of the pier. Two uniformed officers got out. One of them I knew quite well. His name was Ed Chaffey. He was a big rangy guy, mature, nearing retirement, and he emanated an unflappable air of authority. I was glad it was he who’d got the call. The other officer was younger and I hadn’t met him before. The fire truck also pulled up, with its lighthouse-sized beam swirling on the roof of the cab. Four firefighters suited up for action jumped down.
I turned to Mr. Torres. “I’m going to have you sit in the police car. It’ll be warmer in there and we may be a while yet.”
“What about Lily?”
The noise and lights were frightening the dog, who was trying to shrink into his lap.
“You can take her with you.”
Daylight had seeped in as much as it was going to but a sleety rain had started up and the damp went to the bone.
Chaffey came over to me. “Hi, Christine. What have we got?”
“Let me deal with Mr. Torres here first. He helped us recover the body. I’m suggesting he sit in the cruiser to keep warm.”
“Sure. Go with this officer, Constable Johnson, will you, sir.”
They left and I led Chaffey over to the body. He took one look at her and called out to the firefighters who had hung back by the truck.
“Thanks, guys, we won’t need you.”
They climbed back into the fire truck and, silently now, drove off.
“Do we know who she is?” Ed asked.
“Her name is Deidre. Her father is Doctor Leo Forgach.”
Ed whistled through his teeth. “Not the forensic shrink?”
“That’s him. We both found her. He’s in hypothermic shock and I’ve had him taken to the hospital.”
Ed knelt down, gently moving aside the collar of Deidre’s jacket.
“Some bastard wasn’t leaving anything to chance, was he? Why the stones, do you think?”
“Keep her in the water, wash away evidence, delay the discovery of the body as long as possible. Any or all of the above.”
“Anything in her pockets, other than stones, that is?”
“I didn’t check. Thought I’d leave that to you.”
“I’ll let the forensic guys do it. At least we know who she is.”
Ed straightened up and glanced around the park. In spite of the early hour, there was already a cluster of the curious gathering on the perimeter. The huge bronze memorial to Samuel de Champlain glistened in the rain. The explorer, cape blowing in the wind, perched high on his stone pedestal, looked out across the lake. Below him, magnificently muscled and half-naked, the savages eyed the bible the priest was showing them.
“Pity old Sam couldn’t tell us anything about what happened,” said Ed.
Over the next couple of hours, more cruisers arrived and the emergency response team leaped into action. Chaffey dispatched his uniformed officers to keep onlookers at bay and had yellow tape strung across the narrow strip of beach and the end of the pier. The path was gravel and my first glance had revealed no sign of tire marks, or footprints for that matter, although I thought the murderer must have driven around the bollards and onto the pier itself in order to drop Deidre in the water. I couldn’t imagine him carrying a body in full view all the way to the end of the pier where we’d found her. Too visible, for one thing, and for another, a dead weight is incredibly heavy.
There was no way we could properly secure the crime scene because essentially it encompassed the entire park. All we could do was keep contamination to a minimum. The forensic team arrived, but as the body had been in the water there wasn’t a lot they could do on the spot except take photographs of the area. Finally, the body was loaded into the van and taken off to the morgue.
“D’you feel like having a coffee?” Chaffey asked me. “You’ll have to share my Thermos.”
I was about to say, “And your bed too if that’s what it takes,” but I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way. At this hour of the morning, in the rain, with damp clothes, no breakfast, I was a coffee slut.
We settled into the patrol car and he unscrewed the lid of the Thermos and poured me a cupful. It was sweet and I don’t take sugar but I was past caring.
He helped himself to some, put the cup on the dashboard, and took out his notebook.
“All right. Start at the beginning. How the hell did you and the shrink get to be here at dawn, fishing the body of a murdered girl out of the pond?”
Chaffey was a good cop. He allowed me to tell my story with the minimum of interjections on his part. What follows is what I told him, although I left out the personal bits concerning my mother.
I was awakened by my phone. It was ten minutes past five, and as I had gone to bed late because I was working on some statement analysis requests, I was a tad grumpy when I answered. I thought it was my mother, Joan, calling from the Hebrides. She has a cavalier disregard for time zones and this wouldn’t have been the first time she had phoned in the early hours of the morning. It turned out the caller was Leo Forgach. He’s the resident forensic psychiatrist at the Behavioural Science Centre where I work, and frankly, he’s not one of my favourite folks. He can be an irritable cuss when he’s under pressure, which is often. When he wasn’t taking everybody’s head off for asking him a stupid question, he was all right, but he could never be called warm and fuzzy. I hardly recognized his voice over the phone; all that aloofness had vanished. He was almost frantic. He said that his daughter, Deidre, appeared to be missing. Her roommate had called to say that she hadn’t come home that night. She herself had just woken up and discovered Deedee’s bed hadn’t been slept in. This was so totally out of character that both of them — Leo and the roommate, Nora — were alarmed. Apparently, Deidre had left about seven o’clock for her usual Tuesday evening jaunt to Casino Rama. She did this on a regular basis but never, ever stayed past midnight. He asked me to help.
Leo picked me up and we drove straight to the casino to see if for some reason she was still there. He recognized her car, which was parked in the lot. The driver’s side front tire was flat. We checked inside the building just in case, but there was no sign of her. Leo pulled rank and got the security staff to help us, and the stamped receipt at one of the blackjack tables indicated she’d left at 10:33.
“What made you think you’d find her in the park?” Chaffey asked.
“Leo has a spare key to the car and he found a note on the passenger seat. It was handwritten and said … let me get this as exact as I can … it said, ‘Okay. I’ll meet you in Memorial Park at the monument. Eleven. Don’t be late, I won’t wait.’”
“Do you have the note?”
“No, I don’t, sorry Ed. It must be in Leo’s pocket. I didn’t think to retrieve it.”
“That’s understandable. You had other things on your mind. There won’t be any prints on it anyway.”
I sipped some more of his coffee, trying to make it last. “I’ve never met Deidre, and at this point, I thought she might be shacking up with somebody and would show up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed back at home.” I hesitated, feeling as if I was betraying a confidence. “He was particularly concerned because she did make a fairly serious suicide attempt when she was sixteen. She jumped off this same pier but was rescued by a pair of joggers.”
“So he was afraid she might have done it properly this time?”
I nodded. “We got here as fast as we could and started to search the shore. When he found her and we got her out of the water, at first it seemed she was in fact a suicide. Then we saw the scarf. There’s no way she could have strangled herself like that.”
“We’ll have to see what forensic tells us.” Ed groaned. “I’m sorry for the girl and I’m sorry for him, but I’m also bloody sorry for myself. All traces are likely washed off; this is a public place with dozens of people going back and forth even at this time of year. And trying to get statements from witnesses at the casino will take us months. Do you know how many people go through those doors on a given day?”
“A lot, I’m sure. Even at five-thirty in the morning, there must have been a couple hundred players in there.”
“Three thousand a day! Give or take.”
He switched on the windshield wipers and stared out gloomily at the black wind-whipped lake.
“Poor bugger. Is he married?”
“Divorced. He also said that relations were strained between him and his daughter.”
“Reason?”
“He didn’t say.”
Ed poured out the last of the coffee into my cup and I finished it off.
“I told Leo I’d phone him as soon as I could. The roommate should also be informed. She’s probably worried sick.”
Chaffey turned to look at me. “This is tricky, isn’t it? You’re absolutely the best person to do that job but you’re not exactly on the case, are you?”
“I could be your consultant if you want to go through proper channels.”
For the first time, he smiled. It looked good on him. “Done. You’ve got yourself a job, Christine Morris. The thrill of the chase is still in your blood, isn’t it?”
I shrugged that off. He was partly right. I had inadvertently got involved and I knew I would have to follow that up as far as I could. I might not have a close friendship with Leo Forgach but I had a lot of respect for him. He was also one of us, one of the team, and as far as I was concerned, that counted for a lot.
CHAPTER THREE
The nurse on emergency said that Leo was under sedation and asleep. He was in no danger and she thought that he could be discharged by tomorrow. I left a message to say that I had called and gave her my personal cell number.
Ed decided to send Constable Johnson with me to speak to Deidre’s roommate, Nora. First we had to drop off Mr. Torres, who was sitting quietly in the back of the police car, Lily asleep beside him.
I got in the back seat, not wanting him to feel awkward with the protective grid separating us.
“What do you think happened to her?” he asked.
“I don’t know at this point. Did you know her well?”
“No, not at all. She live on my street, that’s all I can say. I see her perhaps once or twice when I’m walking Lily.”
“Do you live alone, Mr. Torres?”
I saw Johnson glance at me in the rear-view mirror. He could hear what I was saying and I had obviously slipped into a familiar mode of questioning. I couldn’t really help it. You can get too suspicious when you’re in homicide and can end up suspecting everybody, which isn’t helpful. On the other hand, I didn’t want to make the mistake of
not
asking questions that might help us later.
“Why do you ask?”
“You’ve had a shock. I wanted to make sure somebody was at home for you.”
This was a bit of prevarication on my part. I was frankly “gathering,” as we call it. Pulling in as much information as possible.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “My mother is at home.” He leaned forward and tapped on the screen. “Turn left at the next street,” he said to Johnson. “I’m in that apartment building on the right. The one with the canopy.”
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Torres. I’ll get your things back to you as soon as I can.”
“I hope the poor man recovers.”
He slid out of the car and with Lily tucked underneath his arm he hurried away.
“Where now?” asked Johnson. He sported a moustache; perhaps he hoped it made him look older but it didn’t. He had the sort of round face and fair skin that always seemed youthful. He was also unsure of himself, which added to the general impression of gaucheness.
I sighed, not relishing the task ahead. “Let’s give the roommate the news. She’s on Mary Street.”
Lights were on in all rooms in the house, which was a small red-brick detached with a covered porch. There was a child’s tricycle on the front lawn. With Johnson behind me, I went up the steps and rang the bell. The door was opened at once. A woman, twentyish, husky, whom I presumed to be the roommate, Nora, stood in the doorway. A skinny little blonde girl of about three, still in her PJs, thumb in mouth, was beside her, eyeing me curiously. I felt a clenching in my stomach. How do you tell a child that age her mother is dead? I didn’t think I’d shown my feelings but I must have revealed something because Nora took a quick intake of breath.