Beautiful Lie the Dead Page 5

  “Why couldn’t I love her, why couldn’t I be what she wanted? I thought she must have messed with some alien from outer space. Until I met you.” She looked across at him and reached for the wine bottle, daring him to disapprove.

  He held his tongue. “The alien from outer space?”

  She grinned. “Yeah, I know. It took me a long time to realize I was staring in the mirror. But I feel more like me here, with you and the Ritalin kid and Zaydie than I ever did in fifteen years with her.” She took a hefty slug. “And in case you start getting ideas, that just means you’re as edgy and crazy and angry as me. You don’t look at the world through this lacy film of superficiality. Mom doesn’t live, she floats. She’s got no anchor, and the minute she bumps up against something ugly, she bounces off into sparkly waters again. I couldn’t stand going back with her, Mike. Not after—”

  “But she’s your mother.”

  “Is she?”

  Startled, Green laughed. “Of course! Of that I’m sure. I wasn’t sure of much else back in those days, but I remember your birth. Your mother was as far from pretty dresses and perfect hair as you can imagine. She sweated and cursed and howled in pain to have you, and when you finally decided to come out—ass first, I might add—she loved you from the first second she held you in her arms. We both did.”

  Hannah stared into her wine glass. She was still, as if the air was too thick to breathe. Green waited, understanding her well enough now to know she was hard at work behind the stillness.

  “Fuck,” she muttered eventually.

  “It doesn’t have to be for long,” he said. “A week, maybe?”

  “I don’t want to miss Hanukkah,” she said, still not looking at him. “Who knows how long Zaydie...”

  There was no need to finish the thought. It was one he himself thought almost every day. His father was eighty-eight, with a feeble heart and failing lungs, facing each cold winter even frailer than the last.

  “Well,” he said cheerfully, “that’s the great thing about Hanukkah. It’s eight days long.”

  FIVE

  Only the faintest blush of pink smudged the horizon up ahead as Green drove eastward along the Queensway towards East Division Station. Traffic was light, but he winced at the long line of headlights inching into town in the opposite direction. He would be coming back that way in less than an hour.

  He held a coffee in his right hand and balanced a bagel against the steering wheel with his left, trying to avoid smearing cream cheese or spilling black coffee onto his pants. He’d left home at this ungodly hour because he was determined to catch Adam Jules before he got busy with his day. Before his old mentor could dodge him one more time. He knew Jules lived alone in a high-rise condo downtown, but in all the twenty-five years he’d known the man, Green had never been privy to his home address or phone number. As far as Green knew, no one in the police department knew, except the senior brass.

  Green had had a restless night interrupted by dreams of his ex-wife spiriting Hannah away from him just as she had eighteen years earlier, smashing the fragile affection that had been building between them. Adam Jules was in the dream too, much younger and new to the department, still possessed of his slight French Canadian accent. He had been chastising Green for neglecting his baby daughter and lecturing him that a police officer who was not grounded in family love would ultimately crash and burn on the punishing front lines of Major Crimes.

  This was a peculiar sentiment coming from Jules. Even more peculiar, Jules was animated, even passionate.

  Green awoke from the dream unsettled and confused. After a quarter century picking up the detritus of mankind’s more brutal clashes, he’d grown used to bizarre dreams. His subconscious at work, cleansing his soul. Vicious criminals resurfaced in his dreams along with poignant victims and unlikely heroes, all intermingled during sleep in startling new ways. He’d learned to accept the wild rides through his subconscious without questioning. Actors in his dream dramas were seldom who they seemed.

  In all those years, though, Jules had never been anything but quiet and still, a ghost-like constant in the emotional chaos around him. In reality, Jules had never admonished him for neglecting Hannah. They had barely known each other back then, Jules a new sergeant in Major Crimes and Green an undisciplined young uniform grappling with his first undeserving death, a naked toddler drowned in the family pool. Green had been the one with the passion. Outrage that the parents were passed out on the couch after a night of partying. Horror that they blamed the child, who’d unlatched their makeshift lid on his crib and clambered free.

  Jules had encouraged Green to look beyond the surface, to probe the parents’ backgrounds and to interview more than a hundred people in pursuit of the truth. All the while he’d never once raised his voice or clenched his fist, even at the end when the Crown declined to prosecute, having decided that the parents had done all they could to protect a very difficult, ingenious child.

  Yet last night Jules had appeared to him in his dream vibrant with passion. What was his subconscious trying to tell him?

  What had it detected in Jules’s mysterious request about the missing woman?

  The morning shift was just gearing up when Green arrived at the spectacular new station known as the Colonies. He signed in, traded greetings with the officers on the front desk and took the stairs two at a time to the top floor. Jules’s clerk wasn’t at her desk but his door was ajar, so Green strode in without knocking. Jules was at his closet, unwinding a long scarf from his neck.

  “I was hoping I’d catch you.”

  Jules pivoted, his hands smoothing his collar. A spasm of concern crossed his face, quickly erased. “Michael,” was all he said. “You’re a hard man to reach.Jules didn’t reply. Never explain, never make excuses, had always been his mantra. He closed his office door and gestured to a seat opposite his massive desk, which sat against the window. “I’m afraid I can’t offer coffee just yet.”

  Green sat down. Orleans was a huge suburb which spilled over every inch of farmland and hillside for miles. The Colonies were tucked into the countryside part way up the Orleans escarpment, and Jules had a sweeping view of the Queensway, the lowland swamp and the Ottawa River beyond. He stood now with his back to Green as if fascinated by the view.

  “Like a luxury hotel, isn’t it?”

  “Adam, what’s your connection to Meredith Kennedy?”

  Jules didn’t move. Green could read nothing in his rigid back.

  “None.”

  “Give me some credit. The woman is missing and an entire city is looking for her. And you know something—”

  “I know nothing.”

  “Then why did you ask me about a missing person even before she was reported missing?”

  Finally Jules turned around. He was faintly pink but otherwise unmoved. “I can assure you I know nothing useful to the investigation. If I learn anything, I will tell you.”

  “But how did you know she was missing?”

  Jules grew pinker. Green realized he was angry, although his only gesture was to draw back his white shirt cuff and check his watch. “None of that is relevant. You have my word, and that should be enough.” His nostrils flared as he calmed himself with an effort. “A concern was raised to me privately, but now that there is an official investigation and every effort is being made to find the woman, I have nothing useful to add. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  He crossed the room to open the door. Green stood up and approached him. “What did you think had happened to her? Did you have some knowledge that she’d been in an accident?”

  “Michael, it was a general inquiry. I knew no details, about an accident or anything else.”

  Green left the Colonies profoundly dissatisfied. He’d never known Adam Jules to lie or to obstruct a police investigation— the man was obsessively honest—yet this time he had come perilously close to both. He knew something, but no amount of badgering was going to pry it from him. Jules was an honourable man, and it
was obvious that he’d given someone his word not to divulge what he knew. After twenty-five years of working together, he did not trust Green enough to confide in him. Was this distrust just an expression of Jules’s secretive nature, or was there a more sinister reason for his stonewalling? Green hoped it was the former, but his instincts prickled.

  He had a search to conduct, yet he felt as if there were a door behind which he was not allowed to look.

  * * *

  The pathetic winter sun had barely crawled over the windowsill into her third floor apartment when Detective Sue Peters sat down at her computer. She had already showered, dressed and brewed herself a full pot of kick-ass coffee. She wanted to get a head start before Gibbsie the computer whiz showed up. He was a sweetheart, but she really didn’t need him holding her hand all day, and if she blundered around in cyberspace for hours instead of skipping nimbly to the websites she needed, who the hell cared? It wasn’t like the inspector was holding his breath for information. She hadn’t even told him the whole story in case it turned out to be a dumb idea.

  Her computer was an aging clunker that hated all the fancy new graphics and regularly crashed when she asked too much of it. The trick was to be patient, not ask it to do two things at once, let it go at its own speed, and it would get the job done. She could relate to that. She and her computer were best buds, and she resisted all Gibbsie’s threats to throw it in the dump. Even the idea felt like a personal affront.

  She already had a plan. She’d been awake half the night, too excited to sleep, and as she lay in the dark knowing that at least her body had to rest, she’d let her mind run loose. It still tripped up, forgot where it had been and where it was going, forgot why too sometimes. But much less now than a year ago or even a month ago. That in itself was as exciting as any case she might work on. Harvey Longstreet was going to get the full brunt of what her healing mind could do.

  After coaxing her computer to load Google, she typed in his name and hit “search”. That yielded a huge bunch of garbage about a circus performer in Australia. What a dumb name for a circus performer—whatever happened to Flying Ace? She added Montreal to the search. The circus had been to Montreal, but in between the mush, she found a single link to a lawyer at McGill.

  It was a posting about a student who had won the Longstreet Prize for Criminal Law. A single footnote indicated that the prize had been established in memory of Harvey Longstreet, a popular professor of Criminal Law who had died in 1978. Sue tried a few other search terms to dig up more information but to no avail. Nineteen seventy-eight was just too long ago to have much presence on the web. After surfing pointlessly for an hour, rebooting four times and drinking all three cups of coffee, even she was ready to toss the old pile of crap into the garbage. Time for Plan B. At least she had a date of death to work from.

  She had recently had her driver’s licence reinstated, so she headed down to the parking lot, where she stood looking in dismay at the mound of snow in her spot. Somewhere under there was her Toyota Echo. The roads were still an unpredictable mess of ice and slush. The sun was trying hard but at these temperatures, nothing was going to melt in a hurry. No point in wearing herself out shovelling before she was halfway through her day, so she left her car for Gibbsie to dig out and called a cab.

  The Ottawa Public Library was only a short hop from her Centretown apartment and the cabbie wasn’t pleased, but that was his problem. The library was in a contest with the police station for the ugliest building in the city. She’d heard the architectural style of both was called Brutalism, as if that was something to be proud of. Brutal it surely was, an ugly chunk of rough brown concrete squatting on the corner like a toad at a garden party. Inside, she made her way straight upstairs to the newspapers and periodicals section and approached a bored-looking library assistant picking his teeth and staring into space behind his computer.

  Judging by how long the CSIs and Law and Orders had been around, everyone loved a good old-fashioned crime investigation, so Sue produced her badge and asked for his help tracking down an old lead. The toothpick was whipped out and the guy was all ears. The Montreal Gazette was on microfilm and he could get it in a jiff, but 1978 was a lot of papers. Any idea when in 1978?

  “Bring them all. You’ll have to show me how to use the machine,” she said, giving him a wink.

  He sat her in the corner at one of the viewers and loaded the first tape for her. January 1978 appeared on the screen, blurry and harsh black against white. This is going to give me one mother of a headache, she thought as she turned the dial and the pages whirred past. She’d barely been a twinkle in her mother’s eye back then and had no memory of life before computers. This is goddamn prehistoric. How the hell did cops do research back then?

  In 1978 the economy was in shambles—what a surprise—and the politicians in the minority government were bickering— another surprise. Quebeckers were on strike, and businesses were crashing all over Montreal. The Gazette, which she knew was Quebec’s main Anglo voice, was full of screaming headlines about the Quebec government’s new language law and the repression of English rights.

  Quebec sure was a lively place, she thought as she scrolled through the months. Being a small-town Ontario girl, the only politics she’d grown up with was whether the town council had been paid off when developers won their bid to pave over some prime farm land.

  She was skimming so fast through the blurry print that she nearly missed the first article entirely. It was tucked into the bottom of the second page of the July 13 issue, a mere mention of an unidentified male found dead in an apartment on McTavish Street near McGill University. McGill was the word that caught her eye. There were few other details, other than to say the body had been found by the landlord after a family member expressed concern. The city was engulfed in a heat wave. The landlord was quoted as saying the man was hanging from a hook in the closet, but police refused to confirm any details.

  She spun the dial forward to the next day’s paper, but despite a careful search, there was no mention of the man. The following day had a small sidebar that the man had been dead for several days but that his identity was being withheld pending notification of family members. It was not until the weekend that a half-page spread on the front page of the Local News section identified the dead man. “Popular law professor’s life ends in tragedy”, the headline said. There was a large photo of him in full court gown, looking into the camera like he was about to address a jury. But even the silly outfit and the prissy expression could not hide the guy’s good looks. Dark curly hair, wide eyes, cheekbones and nose like a perfectly carved Greek god. He looked no more comfortable in that pointy, strangling collar than she would. He belonged at the helm of a yacht in the Caribbean. Below the photo was the caption “Maître Harvey Longstreet divided his time between McGill Law School and a select law practice involving criminal code appeals, but still found time to author several books on appellant law.”

  Sue combed through the article carefully. It read like a press release from the family. Although Longstreet had apparently taken his own life in the apartment he maintained downtown close to the university, the word suicide wasn’t even mentioned. According to his Uncle Cyril, Longstreet used the apartment as a retreat for rest and work during his hectic, sometimes eighteen-hour days. There was a bunch of quotes from students who adored him, from colleagues who hailed him as the next Clarence Darrow—Sue wasn’t sure who that was but had a vague recollection of a famous American human rights trial lawyer—and even from an old schoolmate at Lower Canada College. She assumed Lower Canada College was like its Upper Canada equivalent, an incubator for future captains of the country.

  Everyone regretted the loss of a man taken at the pinnacle of his powers, who’d left a legacy of cases untried and a young wife and infant son to mourn his loss. In all this gushing, there was precious little about the death itself. No autopsy results, no mention of nooses or closets. Montreal police were briefly quoted as saying foul play was not sus
pected, and the landlord who’d blabbed about the body hanging in the closet now had no comment.

  Things sure were different in those days, she thought. Today the landlord would have cashed in big time, selling his story to some trashy rag that didn’t give a damn about facts, integrity or family sensitivities. It was interesting to see that in 1978, Harvey Longstreet’s family had enough money, or clout, to muzzle a story that might have blown the guy’s perfect image to smithereens in their faces. Had the police investigated at all, or had the family’s embarrassment shut them down too?

  There were many questions that remained unanswered, many secrets that the family and Elena had kept to themselves. But the story seemed deader than a doornail, and Sue couldn’t imagine how an old suicide, no matter how tragic, had anything to do with anything.

  * * *

  At ten a.m. Thursday morning, sixty-four hours and three brutal winter nights after Meredith Kennedy had last been heard from, Constable Whelan of Missing Persons finally managed to persuade his contacts at Meredith’s bank to give him a peek at her records. Officially banks and phone companies required search warrants to permit police access to a citizen’s records, but a warrant required proof of a crime. Being missing was not a crime, no matter what the private fears of the police were. Like all businesses, however, banks didn’t want to appear uncooperative when a young woman’s life might be at stake. After ten years in Missing Persons, Whelan had enough inside contacts to persuade someone to open the books.

  By Thursday, things were not looking good. The city had been turned upside down by a burgeoning army of friends, family, women’s groups and other concerned volunteers, and the media was dogging their every move. Medical and weather experts had been thrust on the air, counting down her diminishing chances for survival if she lay injured somewhere. The mood in the incident room had turned sombre, and the search coordinator was already talking in terms of recovery more often than rescue.