Do or Die Read online

  But for some, the nose was enough to fire up old myths and prejudices, and whether Weiss had reacted to the nose or the odour of his suit, Green couldn’t be sure. Weiss had swivelled on his heel without a word and led the way across the vast marble foyer into the mercifully air-conditioned interior. He moved with impeccable grace, but his blue linen suit was buttoned wrong, and his toupee dipped over one ear. Not quite recovered from this morning’s excursion after all, Green thought with some satisfaction.

  On the drive over, he had tried to plan his interview strategy. Marianne Blair, he had learned from Jules’ briefing file, was the only child of a wealthy British Columbia shipping magnate who had made his fortune as a young man shipping timber from the virgin forests of the young province. He had diversified into oil and real estate later in life and had established the Lindmar Foundation as a means of purchasing immortality, as well as tax relief. To groom his daughter for her role as elegant patroness, he had sent her first to Eastern private schools and later to universities in British Columbia and Europe. But rumour had it that beneath the civilized veneer, Marianne Blair was her father’s clone: willful, self-indulgent and stubborn as a mule.

  Green had expected to find her raging mad and demanding vengeance. Judging from the way the law enforcement top brass had jumped to attention earlier, he had thought he would be bullied and threatened. But seated opposite her now, looking into her eyes, he saw no fire in them. Only bewilderment. She was a mother like any other at this moment, he thought, and felt himself relax. With her permission, he set his tape recorder on the table so that he could give her his full attention.

  “Mrs. Blair, I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I need to know about your son. Are you up to answering a few questions?”

  She nodded, and he began. She had last seen Jonathan at breakfast yesterday, she said. They lived alone with a housekeeper; Jonathan was an only child, his parents divorced. It had been just like any other morning. Jonathan was an early riser, and she had a busy schedule ahead of her so they had eaten about seven. They had spoken little, but that too was usual. They liked each other’s company but did not feel compelled to talk. She had reports to read, and he was absorbed in a journal article. He had always been a voracious reader and never sat at the table without a book in hand. He had commented that he would be at the university all day and wasn’t sure when he would be home. This too was usual. He spent much of his time in his lab or the library.

  “Did he tell you what he planned to do yesterday? Anyone he planned to meet?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t really talk.”

  “To your knowledge, did your son use drugs?” He saw her stiffen. Weiss started to protest, but Green cut him off. “It’s confidential, Mrs. Blair, but I have to know.”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “I need the names of all known friends and associates.”

  “Peter said you’d need that information, so we’ve prepared a list. We haven’t got all the phone numbers, I’m afraid, but we’ll keep working on it.” She glanced across at Weiss expectantly, and he slipped out of the room.

  “Thank you.” Green watched until he had disappeared, then leaned forward. Without Weiss, he had a much better chance of reaching her. “Do you know of anyone who might have had reason to kill your son?”

  She sighed, and some of the stiffness seemed to dissipate. “I have racked my brains over and over, and I can’t for the life of me think who might have done this. Or why. It makes no sense.”

  “Did he have any enemies?” She was shaking her head. “Any conflicts, any fights with anyone?”

  “No! Jonathan avoided conflict. He was too nice; people walked all over him. He never seemed to get angry— something he certainly didn’t get from me.” Unexpectedly, she faltered. “But he was a wonderful boy. I’m not criticizing him. He was generous, sensitive, forgiving. Sometimes I was afraid of what life would do to him. And look what it’s done.”

  “Was there anything out of the ordinary about him yesterday? Anything he said? His mood? Behaviour?”

  She breathed deeply to collect herself. “Actually, he did seem tense. Distracted. He poured juice into his cereal.” A smile trembled on her lips. “I asked him if anything was wrong, but Jonathan is a private person. He’s used to solving his own problems—a casualty of having a busy mother, I guess. If something was troubling him, he became even quieter until he’d worked it out.” She cocked her head thoughtfully. “In fact, he’s been quieter the whole past week or so.”

  “Did you get the impression something was troubling him?”

  She pressed her large, coarse hand to her lips. A faraway look had crept into her eyes. “I think he was going to tell me. The night before he died. He came downstairs from studying about eleven o’clock, and he asked me if I wanted tea. I said I was going to bed, so he went back upstairs. But…he looked upset. Oh, God.” She put her face in her hands.

  Green hated tears. He panicked at the thought that he might have to provide solace. Watching her quiver on the brink, he plunged ahead.

  “Do you have any idea what it might have been? Was there anything going on in his life that might have been on his mind?”

  She rallied with an effort and rubbed her eyes on her sleeve. Green glanced around the room for a kleenex, but the tables held nothing but china figurines. He wondered what room they really lived in.

  “I don’t know,” she replied when she could speak. “He’s been working very hard in his lab, but he loves his work. Jonathan leads—” she stumbled, chin quivering “—led a quiet life. He just had his studies, a small circle of friends, cycling on the weekend. I worried it was too quiet, too restricted a life for a young man. He takes after his father that way, not me.”

  “Any girlfriends?”

  “Not now, but Jonathan attracts girls. Partly his money, but also his gentleness. And he’s a very handsome man. He’s always been a little bewildered by what his looks do to women.”

  “Any recent break-ups? Any vengeful women?”

  “A fairly recent break-up, yes. But I believe it was amicable. I can’t imagine Vanessa being vengeful, she’s far too bright. Too much her own woman.”

  He sensed an edge, but perhaps it was just natural maternal jealousy. His own mother had never considered any of the many girls in his youth good enough for him either. Of course, considering the girls he had picked…“Vanessa?” he probed gently.

  “Vanessa Weeks, one of his classmates. They’d been dating for almost a year, but they broke up last month. I don’t know why, actually, because I had the feeling Jonathan still cared for her.”

  “Maybe it was her idea.”

  “I don’t think so.” Mrs. Blair drew her brows together. “She called here one night a few weeks ago looking for him, and we talked. She seemed very fond of him. Said he was shutting her out, and she was very worried about him. I’d say she was upset, but certainly not angry. Jonathan is so nice he’s hard to get mad at.” She looked rueful. “Something else he gets from his father.”

  “Where is his father?”

  “Vancouver. Jonathan hasn’t seen him in some time.” Her voice was flat, but she reddened slightly, and Green sensed a surge of hidden feeling. Bitterness? Fear? Or something else.

  “Mrs. Blair, do you have any enemies, anyone who might want to send you a warning or punish you for something?”

  “Punish me?” Her eyes widened as the connection hit her.

  “You’re thinking of Jonathan’s father? Ridiculous. Henry adored Jonathan, would lay down his life for him. I am by far the less important person in Henry’s life.”

  Something else, Green decided. Maybe regret. He filed the observation away. “How about other enemies? Disgruntled business associates, psychotic artists?”

  A shadow passed over her face, gone before he was even sure it was there. She squared her shoulders and jutted out her chin. “Sure, I have enemies. You can’t deal in money without angering someone. Peter Weiss handles them.”r />
  “Anyone threaten you? Threaten your family?”

  She scowled, the softness of a moment ago quite gone. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. I can be abrasive, but no one hates me that much.”

  “Believe me, Mrs. Blair, there are all kinds of nuts out there. Would Mr. Weiss even bother to tell you?”

  Her eyes hardened, and she stared at him for a moment. Then colour suffused her face. “If he didn’t, there would be hell to pay.”

  Weiss hustled back into the room, paper in hand. Green had heard no footsteps approaching on the marble and wondered if Weiss had been listening at the door all this time.

  “Peter!” she snapped. “Have there been any threats against Jonathan that you haven’t told me about?”

  Weiss stopped in his tracks. “Certainly not, Marianne. Our investigators don’t tell me all the details, of course—”

  “Bullshit!”

  Weiss coloured. “But I’m sure anything as important as that—”

  Mrs. Blair swung on him, eyes blazing. The fighter had returned. “I want you to tell this officer everything! If I find out you’re withholding information that he needs to find my son’s killer, you’ll be pumping gas in Flin Flon!”

  The sight of Weiss’ face was repayment enough for the pompous aide’s earlier disdain, and Green was hard put to keep a smile off his own. Returning to more neutral ground, he spent ten minutes trying to trace Jonathan’s movements on the three days before his death. He learned that Marianne Blair knew very little about her son’s daily life, a discovery which distressed her but did not surprise him. How much had he let his own mother know about his activities in the years before she died?

  Afterwards, Weiss showed him upstairs so that he could search Jonathan’s room. It took little time. The small room contained nothing but a single bed, dresser, desk, computer and shelves and shelves of books. His closet held a modest collection of conservative but expensive leisure clothes, as well as two dress suits and a Harris tweed sports coat. His desk was crammed with notes, articles and papers, but there was no diary, address book or appointment calendar to shed light on his activities. If Jonathan Blair kept any personal records, he kept them elsewhere.

  On the desk lay a computer printout of a complex statistical analysis which Jonathan had obviously been studying. Red underlinings and asterisks peppered the pages. Was this what Jonathan had been working on the night before his death, when he had come down to his mother, upset and wanting to talk? Green examined the printout curiously but could make little sense of it. He had been forced to confront statistics for his forensic science course at the police academy as well as his masters thesis in criminology, but he had avoided them when possible ever since.

  He was puzzled, however, by the array of numbers on the desk of an English literature student, and became even more so when he turned to the books on the shelves. He expected Chaucer, Dickens and an entire shelf of Shakespearean plays. Instead, he found formidable tomes on disorders of the limbic system and the neuropsychology of memory. Suddenly he remembered Marianne Blair’s use of the word ‘lab’ and cursed himself for failing to pick up on it. In the excitement of Sullivan’s tale earlier, they had both made the leap from the place where Jonathan was stabbed to the subject matter he was studying. A rookie’s error in logic, which neither should have made.

  Pulling out the nearest book on the brain, he headed back downstairs and found Marianne Blair on the phone in the living room, looking all business.

  “What was Jonathan working on at the university?” Startled, she swung on him and pressed her hand over the receiver. “He was doing his Masters in cognitive neuroscience, conducting research on auditory channels in the brain.”

  “Does he have an office at the university?” “A lab. At least he has a desk, computer and files somewhere. I’ve never been there.”

  “Did he have an associate? Was he working with anyone?” “Oh yes. There’s a whole group of graduate students, most of whom are on the list I gave you. They’re all working under Dr. Myles Halton.”

  There was respect in her voice as she uttered the name, as if her accomplishments were nothing compared to his.

  Green had never heard of him. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “To a neuropsychologist, yes. He’s one of the up-and-coming experts on language and the brain. Students from all over Canada, even the world, would sell their souls for the chance to work with him.”

  * * *

  The ten detectives from the Major Crimes Squad had been waiting for half an hour by the time Green barrelled through the door of the conference room. Sullivan had installed them in the unrenovated briefing room walled in blackboards and cork, for which Green secretly thanked him. How he hated the high-tech flash that passed for progress in modern meetings. More time was wasted fiddling with control buttons than it took to fill an entire chalkboard with facts.

  Sullivan had used the waiting time to brief them on the background of the case and to pin sketches and photographs of the scene to the cork board on the wall. It took Green an additional ten minutes to report on his visit to the Blair house.

  “You are to keep the procedural screw-ups strictly to yourselves,” he admonished in the most inspectorish tone he could muster. “I’ve looked at the case, and I don’t think the crime scene would have told us a hell of a lot more anyway. Jonathan Blair was a quiet, law-abiding kid with no priors, not even a speeding ticket. There aren’t any obvious motives for his murder, and we certainly have no ready suspects. But we’ve got more than enough leads to follow. As the facts stand now, and ruling out robbery and psychos, there are three possible motives. The first two, given the age of the victim, are predictable.”

  Green turned to the blackboard and wrote a word in block letters. “Drugs. Was a deal going down in that remote section of the library? Jonathan Blair had no wallet in his possession. No money was found at the scene. But Ident has vacuumed every inch of the carpet in the vicinity, and if some drugs spilled, they’ll find them. The forensic pathologist is working on Blair’s body now, and he’ll tell us if Blair was a user. Meanwhile, we use our standard investigative techniques. Ask his associates, check his bank accounts.”

  He jotted the words “forensics, autopsy, interviews, bank” under “Drugs” and moved over to write a new column. “Passion. Blair attracted girls. His mother says there was a recent break-up; check into it, check into jilted lovers and jealous rivals. According to his mother, Jonathan never got angry and never treated people badly, a rose-tinted view of her boy. Let’s find out the truth. He was twenty-four years old, single, rich and handsome. There’s got to be some skeletons.”

  Green studied the men around the conference table. He had worked with most of them in the fourteen years he had been solving major crimes. Jules was no fool. He had given Green the ten best officers on the Squad. Sometimes when Green took a personal interest in a case, he ended up doing much of the field work himself because he doubted the competence of anyone else. It didn’t make him popular with the staff sergeant who managed the squad or with the brass, who liked their pigeon holes, but it felt good to be on the streets again.

  The men before him were all solid, experienced investigators who needed little direction, but Deputy Chief Lynch’s personal interest added an extra twist. Thoughtfully Green turned to the third column on the blackboard and wrote “Innocent Bystander”, debating how much to let his own disdain and suspicion show through.

  “That’s the third motive in this case, the one that Lynch believes most likely. Jonathan Blair may be dead simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, standing in the medieval literature section of the university library while a heavy drug deal went down. Or while some freshman got mugged for his bus money.”

  There was a cautious ripple of laughter. The detectives generally shared Green’s view of the top brass, but they never knew who the spies might be.

  Green shrugged, deadpan. “It is possible. So check i
t out, get the help of university security, ask the drug squad, poke around to see if anyone saw anything suspicious last night.”

  Green dusted chalk dust off his hands and stepped away from the board. “That’s it. I don’t have any idea which motive is right. Maybe it’s something else entirely. I don’t think it was robbery, but his wallet was missing, so ask his friends how much money he usually carried around with him. I also don’t think it was a psycho. Too clean. So we have five things we need to do.” Green picked up the chalk again. “One team— Watts and Charbonneau—you search for possible witnesses to the crime. I know the guys last night did a routine canvass of people who were at the library, but I want us to do it again. Set up a hotline and advertise it on the radio stations and in the newspapers, on the University’s PA system. Another thing you can do is check the computer records of books taken out or returned on the evening of June 9, especially with call numbers from the fourth floor.”

  Watts and Charbonneau exchanged grimaces. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Lots of work and very little payoff.

  “The second team—Jackson and Laplante—find out all you can about the victim, including his friends and his recent movements.” Green paused as a small inconsistency niggled into his thoughts. “Blair was studying neuropsychology, which is on the fifth floor of the library. He was killed on the fourth, plus he was killed in a remote corner, not a place you’d usually pass going from one part of the library to another. Find out what he was doing in the literature section.

  “The third team—Gibbs and O’Neil—get the autopsy and forensic results, bug them until every last detail is in, and follow up any lead they give. If there are none, help Watts and

  Charbonneau. Don’t bug me for every little thing. You guys know your job, but if anybody gets a major break, radio me ASAP.”

  He paused a moment, scanning the scribbling on the board. “The fourth team is to conduct a search of Blair’s university lab and interview all his professors, fellow students and associates who aren’t on Jackson’s list. That’s a big job. Goodwin, you better work with Perchesky and Proulx on it.” He grinned at the last remaining detective unassigned. “Brian, you’re coming with me.”