Honour Among Men (12 page)

“Well, he wasn't military. Local, maybe?”

“Do you recall if this Roger was actually in the bar at the time of Oliver's death?”

“Yeah, he was at the table with Danny. Would have seen the whole thing if he hadn't been passed out on the table top.”

“When did Roger report this information?”

“He didn't report it. Like I said, he blabbed it to his buddies along with a whole lot of bullshit about the army.
This was maybe a year after Danny's death. I remember it was the same time as the government shut down the Somalia Inquiry, just when all that stuff was coming out about the Airborne Regiment torturing civilians on their peacekeeping assignment over there. The guys at the table were all saying the
UN
and the government doesn't know the half of what goes on. Roger just added his story about Danny's death to top the pack.”

“So you didn't believe it worth passing on?”

Rob fixed Green with an exasperated stare that said one more snarky crack out of you and your big city snout will be sticking out your ass. “Listen, I told Norrich and—”

“Wait a minute. Norrich was still investigating the case?”

“Naw. He was in here one night drinking with some of his army friends. He thought the story was a crock.”

Green glanced at McGrath, whose frown spoke volumes. The Lighthouse was hardly the type of place you want your high-ranking police officers hanging around. Keeping his expression neutral and disinterested, he flipped ten dollars onto the table and stood up. “Well, I guess we'll go see if we can find anything on Roger buried in those boxes down at the station.”

She looked dismayed. “Tonight?”

He checked his watch, which read nearly midnight. He smelled a lead, but in a ten-year-old trail, a few hours was not going to change anything. He forced himself to behave. “First thing tomorrow will be fine.”

When Green strode into the incident room at eight o'clock the next morning, however, he found McGrath already ensconced at the table and surrounded by files. Her face was haggard with fatigue and her blue eyes were bloodshot. She was still
wearing the same cableknit sweater and jeans she'd had on the night before.

He grinned. “You're worse than me.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I couldn't sleep. I figured you only have one more day here, and I can always sleep tomorrow.”

Worry pinched her brows despite the smile on her face. Green suspected he knew the source—Norrich—but he sidestepped her unspoken fears. “I appreciate your help. Find anything?”

She shoved the files away and slumped back in her chair. “Not so far. Whatever the bartender told Norrich, it didn't end up in his official reports. Norrich probably considered the information unreliable.”

“No evidence that he followed up either?”

She pursed her lips, as if to keep her thoughts to herself. “At that point it was a pretty cold case and we had a few other things on the go. Plus . . . Norrich got promoted out of the unit.”

Green had his own theories as to why Norrich had never followed up on the tip. For one thing, it would have meant admitting he frequented the strip club, but more likely, he'd been too damn drunk to remember anything he'd been told. From McGrath's disgusted expression, he suspected it was not the first time.

He smiled at her. “You had breakfast yet?”

She looked up, her face lighting at the idea. “Oh man, I'd kill for a double shot of Columbian Dark.”

He laughed. “My kind of woman.” He unhooked her jacket from the door knob and held it out. “Lead on, Sergeant.”

She led him on foot down Duke Street to Argyle at a pace that soon left him huffing. Her long, effortless stride suggested an athlete, and once again he cursed the long hours he spent behind his desk. Walking the dog from tree to tree
around the block did not seem to be doing the trick.

The Economy Shoe Shop was a trendy bistro tucked into a block of heritage storefronts on Argyle. At eight o'clock, it was packed with workers catching their last dose of caffeine before heading to the office, and the hiss of cappuccino machines rose over the general chatter. Green breathed in the smells. Strong coffee, fresh muffins, and the buttery sweetness of croissants. His stomach contracted, and he selected a banana chocolate chip muffin, feeling virtuous for having passed on the croissants.

The shop had a cluster of cast iron chairs outside on a cobblestone patio. A brisk breeze kept most of the patrons indoors, but McGrath found a small patch of sunlight and sat down, tilting her face to the rays and shutting her eyes. A smile spread across her features as she savoured her first sip.

Arousal tingled unexpectedly through Green, bringing a mixture of idle pleasure and caution. It was just as well he was going back on the ten o'clock flight tomorrow morning, he thought, as he busied himself unwrapping his muffin.

“So,” he said, “in your search last night, did you find any references in the bar to a military connection?”

She opened one eye almost reluctantly. “There were several soldiers among the witnesses. In fact, the man who was seen in conversation with the assailant—the one who gave me the fake
ID
—he seemed military. The precise language and the ramrod back tend to give them away. At the time, I figured he was slumming it and didn't want to be found out.”

“Did he think the assailant was military?”

“If he did, he didn't volunteer it. He said they just talked about the news on
TV
.”

Green mulled this over. In his experience, soldiers, like police, shared a kinship that they could sense a mile off. If the
two men had both been military, the first words out of their mouths would have been “What's your unit?”

Maybe it had been. “Did you believe him?”

She opened both eyes and turned to face him. In the sunlight, her blue eyes were startling. They held a glint of excitement. “Not particularly, especially once I found out he'd lied about his
ID
. But at the time I had no reason to be suspicious, so I just let him go. I had a whole bar full of drunken witnesses to go through.”

He returned her smile for an instant before his thoughts scattered again. “So now we're stuck with not just one, but two unknown soldiers. Maybe if we poke around in Danny's military service, we can get some names to go with them. Did you find out anything else?”

Her smile broadened as she flipped a page in her notebook. “I did. I found an interesting witness who was at the bar that night. In his statement at the time, he said he'd been asleep and had seen nothing. But his name was Roger Atkinson.”

Back at the police station, McGrath set out to track down the current whereabouts of Roger Atkinson while Green put in a call to Gibbs. He relayed the information about Daniel Oliver's murder and its potential connection to his military past, then asked Gibbs to start tracking Oliver's army associates. Normally Gibbs was conscientious and thorough to a fault, and Green knew if there was any information to be found, Gibbs would pry it loose. But this morning he sensed the young detective was barely listening.

“What's up, Gibbs?”

Gibbs's newfound confidence echoed through the phone
lines as he filled Green in on his own inquiries. He didn't stutter once.

“Yesterday Detective Peters and I interviewed the desk clerk and other residents of the Vanier hotel where our Jane Doe—I mean Patricia Ross—was staying. They said she seemed to spend her time like any other tourist. She'd go out in the morning, catch a bus on the corner and be gone most of the day. They always noticed her because of that big flowery purse she carried everywhere. She had a street map, and once she asked the desk clerk in the lobby how to get to the Voyageur Bus Station and also the House of Commons. She seemed quite disappointed that it wasn't in session because of the election.”

“The bus station?” Green pounced on the implication. The House of Commons was a standard destination for any tourist to Ottawa, but the Voyageur bus station wasn't. It was strictly for cheap intercity travel. “Did you—”

“Sue's going down to the bus station this morning, sir,” Gibbs interjected. “She's taking the photos of the
DOA
and the purse to see if anyone remembers her.”

Green chuckled to himself at the pride in Gibbs's tone. Pride not only in his own investigative skills, but also in his partner. Who would have thought the mismatched pair would ever gel? “Excellent. Keep me posted. If Patricia took a bus somewhere outside of Ottawa, she was probably going to meet someone important. This was a woman on a mission, I'm convinced of it. Anything else to report?”

“Yessir!” Gibbs's voice cracked in his exuberance. “The dead woman apparently made a number of phone calls from the payphone in the hotel lobby, and she received at least one there that the desk clerk can remember. It was a man's voice. We're working on getting the phone records for that payphone, which might even tell us who she was meeting.”

When Green hung up, he was energized by the progress being made on all fronts. They still had no idea what was going on, but with all the promising avenues opening up, he sensed the solution was almost within reach. He was just jotting some notes in his book when McGrath burst back into the room, brandishing her notebook. Her whole body vibrated with excitement.

“Well!” she announced, tossing the notebook down on the table. “This is an interesting coincidence. Roger Atkinson's mother hasn't seen him in nine years, ever since he was offered some plum job up in Ontario. According to my calculations, this job came less than two months after he opened his big mouth about Daniel Oliver's death.”

Today, Twiggy decided, was a make or break day. No more games or stall tactics. That resolution put some energy into her flagging muscles as she trudged up Albert Street on her way to Tim Hortons for her daily dose of caffeine and doughnuts.

The spring sun was finally warm enough to sit outside without discomfort, and she was just arranging her bulk against the brick wall when the manager opened his shop door to give her a coffee. This time as she sucked back the bitter liquid, he stood over her hesitating.

“A man was in the shop last night, asking about you,” he said.

She paused, her cup to her lips. “Asking how?”

“Just asking if I knew anything about a bag lady who hangs out around here.”

She frowned. Who the hell would be interested in what she was up to any more? Her thoughts drifted to her family. Her in-laws were a write-off, of course. Way too much pain for them to ever face her. They hadn't even come to the coroner's inquest, brief and pointless as it had been. When the recommendations came down—about plugging gaps in the mental health delivery system, about increasing the monitoring of psychiatric outpatients and improving emergency response protocols to 911 calls—they had written her a very short note.
So sorry, dear. He was our son. May God forgive him, and I hope you can
. Then they had dropped out of her life.

The only blood relatives she still had were her sister and her family, but Linda kept her children under lock and key, as far as possible from their derelict aunt and the unspeakable memories she evoked. As if Twiggy herself were a symbol of all that could go wrong in their neatly ordered, middle-class world, and just seeing her, like Medusa, could bring her cursed life down upon them.

Still, maybe twice a year Linda or her husband Norm would track her down and pay her a visit. Give her some money and some clothes, bring her news of the children. Sometimes they'd pack her into the car—always with a beach towel spread over the seat, Twiggy noticed—and take her to the doctor or the dentist. Never home for dinner. You never know with curses, after all. So they would buy her a burger at Wendy's with all the trimmings and a healthy salad to match, before dropping her off at the “Y” shelter and driving back to the tree-lined crescents of Kanata, where the noise and mess of the world were carefully kept at bay.