Honour Among Men (30 page)

“I don't think my husband is suggesting you should sweep anything under the rug, gentlemen.”

To Green's surprise, Blakeley did not object to her interference, nor pull his hand away. “Of course I'm not, and I know that's not what the inspector means. He's saying that a young man died—two young men if we count Ian
MacDonald —and finding out why is more important than personal reputations or public trust.”

“Not just finding out why,” Green said, “but who. Because the killing hasn't stopped—”

“You're not implying my husband had anything to do with that!”

Since she was running such effective interference, Green decided perhaps she was the one he needed to reach. “He knows something, Mrs. Blakeley. He was the leader of the mission where Ian MacDonald's troubles began. He can't pretend ignorance when the victims keep piling up. First Ian MacDonald, then Daniel Oliver, his fiancée Patricia Ross, Detective Peters, and the latest, a homeless woman whose only crime was to be in the vicinity when Patricia Ross was killed.”

Blakeley looked shocked. Almost stricken. He looked at his wife searchingly, and she tightened her grip on his hand. For a moment neither spoke, then Blakeley shook his head. “I don't know what happened. I wish I could be more help.”

“Where were you on April 9, 1996, ten years ago?”

Blakeley frowned. “I have no idea. In 1996 I was posted here in Ottawa from January to August.”

“Did you travel to Halifax during that time?”

“Not that I recall.”

“That was just before our wedding,” Leanne said. “You proposed to me in April, remember, darling?” She smiled at the detectives. “I don't think we spent a single night apart for nearly a year.”

“You're absolutely sure?” Green asked. “No business trips, brief consultations? Because we will be verifying this.”

Blakeley was shaking his head back and forth, but Green thought he looked distracted. Even pale.

“How did you get on with Corporal MacDonald?”

Blakeley shrugged. “He was no trouble. As I said, he was
that fine balance the Canadian military needs for our peacekeeping role—a warrior with heart—because we are both fighters and humanitarians.”

“Did Ian MacDonald have any conflicts with anyone else on the team?”

“Most people liked him.”

“Well, there was that police officer,” Leanne said.

Green leaped at the remark. “Who?”

Blakeley gave her a sharp look, but she ignored it. “The one you told me about. It may be important, John.”

“It's ancient history, honey. A trivial disagreement, that's all.”

“Didn't you say they disagreed about a cause of death or something?

“Or something.”

“Whose death?” Green interjected.

“I don't recall.” Blakeley shook his head grimly. “God knows there were enough deaths to argue over.”

“Still,” she said, “if the police think there's a connection, and if people are still getting killed, then maybe—”

Abruptly Blakeley stood up. “No. This is a fishing expedition, and I will not continue this speculation any further. Innocent people are being maligned.”

“Innocent people are being killed,” Green retorted. “I need the police officer's name, Blakeley. Was it Jeff Weiss?”

Blakeley strode to the apartment door and yanked it open without a word. As Green and Sullivan rose to go, Leanne moved quickly to their side. “He was from Ottawa, I know that much. You can figure it out.”

Bastard!” Sullivan exclaimed as soon as they were in the elevator out of earshot. “If that sonofabitch did that to Peters, I'll personally string him up by the balls!”

Green leaned against the faux marble wall and looked across at him, puzzling over the final moments of the interview. “Which sonofabitch?”

“Weiss, of course! That's obviously the cop the wife was referring to. He was the one MacDonald had the beef with.”

“But he wasn't in a position to cover up anything. He was a civilian cop, he had no power over MacDonald.”

“Doesn't matter. We're fishing in the dark here, Mike. All we know for sure is that something upset MacDonald. It could have been Weiss accusing him of some wrongdoing, which got under MacDonald's skin. Then, when he killed himself, Oliver accused Weiss and got killed for his big mouth. Weiss had the strength and the training to deliver the blow, and we know he had the temper. He thought he got away with it, and then ten years later along comes Patricia Ross threatening to blow the lid off.”

The elevator stopped, and they headed outside towards the Malibu. As he scrambled to keep pace with Sullivan's purposeful stride, Green weighed the idea dubiously. “But why would Hamm cover for Weiss? Hamm is a military bigshot, Weiss is nothing but a low-level cop. And where does Atkinson fit in?”

“Maybe nowhere. Maybe his story about the military contact in supplies is the truth.”

Green snorted. “And Hamm?”

Sullivan yanked open the door. “I don't know, Mike. Maybe he and Weiss have a history somewhere.” He started the car and revved the engine impatiently. “I say we bring Jeff Weiss in and lean on him.”

“But he's a cop, Brian. We can't go accusing one of our own when we're still missing half the pieces.”

Sullivan pulled a U-turn and squealed the car back down Laurier Avenue towards the police station. “But maybe he can give them to us. He's the weakest link here. Weaker than Blakeley or Hamm.”

Privately, Green knew he was right, and usually it was he who was itching to plunge ahead and Sullivan who was the voice of restraint. But at the moment, Green's mind was elsewhere; not with Weiss and his betrayal of his badge, but with Blakeley and his peculiar behaviour during the interview. Of all the men on their list of potential suspects, Blakeley had means, motive and opportunity in spades. He had the most to lose if his complicity in war crimes, or his murder of Oliver, ever came to light. Not just his hard-earned reputation but his promising future at the very centre of government. He was a decisive, physical man trained to size up a threat and eliminate it. He was skilled enough to kill Oliver and Patricia Ross with his bare hands. And with his frequent commuting between Ottawa and Petawawa, he could easily have come to Ottawa to kill Ross, returned to Petawawa to attack Peters and come back in Ottawa to abduct Twiggy.

He made a damn compelling suspect, and his demeanour during the interview had been decidedly suspicious. He had spent the first half giving a campaign speech and the second
half dancing evasively around Green's more pointed probes. When that failed, he had pretended offence and abruptly terminated the interview.

Yet it was his behaviour rather than his words that puzzled Green. At the beginning he had been chatty and collegial when lecturing them on the pitfalls of peacekeeping, but when Oliver's death was mentioned, he suddenly lost his hearty charm. As the names of more recent victims piled up, he became visibly shaken and distracted, as if the news had shocked him.

Yet if he was the killer, why the shock? Why not a defensive parry or the well-practised evasion he had displayed earlier? Even odder than the shock was his wife's behaviour. It was astonishing enough that she had interrupted her husband's meeting with the police in order to come to his rescue, but even more astonishing that he allowed it. Furthermore, at the end of the interview, she had essentially handed them Constable Weiss over the protests of her husband. This was not a stupid woman. She had a reason for what she'd done, and she had obviously thought giving up Weiss would help her husband, whether he wanted it or not. The question was—why?

By the time Sullivan pulled into the parking lot of police headquarters, Green still had no answers, but at least he had a plan. He glanced at his watch, which read noon. No time to spare. He jumped out of the car before Sullivan had even brought it to a stop.

“Okay, we're going to lean on Weiss,” he said. “But first we're going to make sure he's got no room to weasel out. So I want you to round up all the available detectives in the squad room and meet me in the incident room in ten minutes.”

Sullivan smiled. “Are you going to tell Superintendent Devine about this? Otherwise, she'll have your balls.”

“I know. That's partly what the ten minutes is for.” He started for the door.

“It'll take more than ten minutes!” Sullivan yelled.

“Just watch me!” Then he sprinted inside the building, took the stairs two at a time and was dialling his office phone in less than thirty seconds. Kate McGrath was not at her desk, and he wasted several minutes badgering the duty clerk before remembering that he had her home number in his book. She picked up on the second ring.

“I need you to check one last thing before you come,” he said.

“I'm just packing to go, Mike. My taxi will be here in half an hour.”

“I'm emailing you two more photos. Just check them out with the Lighthouse bartender.”

“But I'll miss—”

“No, you won't. Have you got a laptop at home? I'll send them directly to you, and you can bring your laptop by the Lighthouse on your way to the airport. Ten minutes, tops.”

“It won't be a proper line-up.”

“So I'll email you a whole photo array. Kate! We've lost another person up here, this time an innocent old lady.”

She fell silent, and he could almost hear her calculating the time. Then she rhymed off her email address. “Just make it quick, Mike, and pray the bartender is there. It's Sunday.”

After he'd sent the photo array, he grabbed his address book again and flipped through it for another number. While he waited for the MacDonalds to answer their phone, he took deep breaths to slow himself down. This next call was going to be delicate work.

After over half a dozen rings, Mrs. MacDonald's quavering voice came on the line. Defeat seeped into her very cadence, a
defeat so profound that nothing could ever lift it, except her son's return to life. Green hated the part of his job which required him to probe the unhealed wounds of survivors.

He introduced himself and reminded her of their last visit. He heard a little gasp of dismay, but she said nothing. He wondered if her husband was in the room.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

A wary “Yes.”

“I'm told Ian kept a diary of his months in Yugoslavia. It may be very helpful to our investigation here. The man who killed Daniel Oliver has tried to kill again, this time one of our police officers.” He paused, debating how deep to poke the knife. She waited in silence. “He may also have killed an innocent bystander. I think the key to the man's identity may lie in your son's diary.”

Still silence.

“I'm really hoping you'll let us have the diary for a day or two. I could send someone from the local
RCMP
to pick it up.”

A slight moan.

“I promise we'll handle it with care and send it back as soon as possible.”

“It's gone.”

Green was so startled he wasn't sure he'd heard properly. “Where?”

“It disappeared years ago, and I don't care where,” she repeated, her voice gathering force. “I didn't want to ever be reminded of those hateful, hateful times. They killed my boy, as truly as if they'd pulled the trigger. They killed his soul.”

Oh, fuck. Green sank back in his chair, listening to her slowly spin out of control. He reached out to stop her.

“Did you read it?”

“No!”

From her vehemence, he suspected she might be lying, but he also knew he was not going to budge her. He forced himself to be gentle. “Did Ian ever mention a Constable Weiss? Or a Captain Blakeley?”

“He didn't talk about those times. He kept them deep inside, as if he was ashamed. And nothing I said...” Her voice broke horribly.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. MacDonald. I'm so sorry I had to trouble you this way. If you do remember anything you want to tell me, please, please give me a call. Any time.”

Green dropped the receiver back into its cradle with a despairing thud and took a moment to collect himself and make sense of this latest news. What had become of the diary? Had Daniel Oliver taken it at the same time he took the medal? If so, had he read something in it that led to his fatal confrontation with Blakeley? And where had it ended up after Oliver's death? In Patricia Ross's apartment, lost among the photos and letters from Daniel's army days?

Green glanced at his watch and was dismayed to see his ten minutes was long over. Reluctantly he picked up the phone, prepared for battle. But Barbara Devine was not answering her cellphone or her phones at either the office or home. Grateful for small mercies, including the fact that Devine's efficient secretary was not on duty Sunday to take up the search, Green left urgent but vague messages on all lines, then grabbed his notebook and headed to the incident room.

When he walked in, seven detectives were assembled around the table. Only Gibbs was missing. They were casually dressed but sat upright in silent attention. Notebooks were open, and a sense of anticipation hung in the air. Green stared at them all gravely. A good bunch, seasoned and level-headed. They would need both those qualities in the next few hours.
He walked up to the head of the conference table and slipped a fresh disk into the laptop which was used to collect and organize all the reports on the case. He dreaded the task ahead.

“The Ross/Peters investigation has reached a highly sensitive and confidential point, and I'm going to ask you not to tell anyone—anyone!—what we're looking at. We're going to be investigating a fellow officer. Anyone uncomfortable with that had better leave now.”

Eyes widened, but no one moved.

“Has the officer been charged?” Leblanc asked.

“No, he has not been charged.” Green summarized the latest developments in the case, including the disappearance of Twiggy and the involvement of high profile Liberal candidate John Blakeley. The energy around the table was electric, until Green came to Weiss's role. As they listened, Green could see the outrage and disbelief on their faces.