Dream Chasers (13 page)

Green slid unobtrusively into a seat at the back and watched as Sullivan targeted the first bubble. “We now know she wasn't alone, so we need to nail down her companion. So let's reinterview all her friends and classmates at Pleasant Park High School. Put some pressure on them. Someone has to know who she was seeing. I have a teenage daughter. Keeping track of who's dating who is a top priority for them. Gibbs, why don't you and Luc take that? You can take a couple of guys from General Assignment to help you.”

Gibbs nodded without enthusiasm. His eyes were redrimmed, and his suit wrinkled, as if he could barely summon the interest for work. His regular partner, Sue Peters, had been severely injured during a murder inquiry a couple of months earlier, and Sullivan had tried unsuccessfully to find a replacement who suited Gibbs' meticulous style. Before Sue's injury, he had just begun to gain confidence and take on a more senior role, but without her brash, charging-rhino style—and the testosterone she seemed to stir up in him— much of the fight had been taken out of him.

Green suspected that his heart and his thoughts were elsewhere, wrapped up in Sue's battle to regain the mental and physical powers she had once taken for granted. Her progress was slow, and her doctors were making no promises about a full recovery. Sue was a fighter, and Green still doubted that a broken skull and a few hundred stitches could keep her down, but Gibbs was the one who sat with her day after day, witnessing her struggle.

Sue Peters would not have taken “I don't know” for an answer from any of Lea's classmates or friends. She would have pummelled them with the question in a dozen different ways, offering up possibilities and accusations until someone let a single name slip. Green could only hope that Gibbs' gentler, more diffident style would sneak behind the kids' defences and achieve the same result. With the finality of Lea's death, surely some of them would feel the need to unburden themselves.

Sullivan pointed the laser at the second bubble. “Ice cream. She had ice cream the night she died. The pagoda at Hog's Back sells it, so start with the staff who were on duty that night. But if necessary, check all the convenience stores and shops in the vicinity, especially along the route between her home and the park.”

“It could have been a street vendor,” one of the detectives said.

“Good point, Wallington. Check if there were any around the park. You and Jones follow up on the ice cream.”

The door to the situation room opened, and Lyle Cunningham walked in carrying a sheaf of papers. Sullivan grinned. “Good timing, Lyle. I was just going to assign someone to bug you.”

The Ident officer didn't even crack a smile. “It wouldn't have done you much good. We don't have much useful at this point. The fingerprint on the park bench turned out to be Lea's, so that confirms she was there but doesn't give us any lead on who else was. Luminol and fluorescence revealed no traces of semen or blood on her backpack or clothing, or on the bench or grass in the vicinity—”

“He might have used a condom,” Green interrupted.

“Yeah, well, that doesn't help us much then, does it?”

“Has anyone searched the nearby trash cans in the park for a discarded condom?”

Watts snorted with derision. “Probably dozens of condoms in them. It's been three days.”

Green fixed the detective with a deadpan stare. Watts had never impressed him with his intelligence nor his commitment. “It's still a lead that has to be followed up, even if we have to eliminate a hundred condoms from our inquiry. A girl is dead.”

Watts shrugged. “All I'm saying is—”

“Sounds like a good job for you, Watts,” Sullivan said briskly. “Should keep you busy till tomorrow.”

Watts retreated into sullen silence, and Sullivan gestured to the Ident officer to continue. “I've sent the bikini to the lab to see if they can pull any trace fibres or fluids from it, but it's a long shot. We've got forty-two exhibits from the island where the body was recovered—including six used condoms,” he added, glancing at Watts, and for the first time sneaking a ghost of a smile, “and we're still processing them, but on the face of it I don't think they'll give us anything. Her body came from somewhere else, and there's no reason to assume she or her companion were even on the island beforehand.”

Green nodded. He knew it would take weeks to process all the evidence in what was likely an exercise in futility, but Cunningham could always be trusted to track down every lead, no matter how minuscule. Lea deserved no less.

“We've also recovered twenty-one pieces of physical evidence from the area around the park bench—all the fairly recent trash, including four cigarette butts, wrappers from a Mars Bar, a Snickers, two Skor Bars, an ice cream sandwich—”

Green pounced. “Ice cream sandwich? How recent?”

“Pretty recent. It hadn't been rained on, and according to
Environment Canada, it rained in that area on Sunday night.
Luckily we got all this stuff gathered before the downpour last
night.”

“That ice cream wrapper is worth a special effort, because she ate ice cream the night she died. Expedite that to the lab.”

Cunningham gave Green a terse nod of acknowledgement before returning to his list. “We also found six marijuana roaches, an empty Advil bottle, three plastic Loeb bags, three Tim Hortons cups, a few shreds of wrappers from Subway, and a bunch of pieces of shredded tissue paper. The lab will try to pull
DNA
off the roaches.” He paused to look hard at Green. “I've prioritized all the stuff that looks like it was deposited there after the rain on Sunday.”

Green smiled broadly. “I never doubted you would, Lyle, but you know me. Mr. Interference himself. How's it going with the evidence search further afield?”

“The search team has turned up nothing remarkable. They've found hundreds of pieces of crap—after all, there's a sports field, a bike path and a picnic grounds in the area—but all we're doing is bagging it and cataloguing it. We won't bother to process it unless we get a good reason. Most of it is probably from Stanley Cup parties. The city should pay us extra for doing their cleanup for them.”

Green glanced at Sullivan, who'd been watching the interchange with a patient smile. After twenty years of working with Green, he knew better than to protest or interrupt. He picked up the thread now. “Bottom line, Lyle?”

Cunningham scowled, a man not comfortable stating bottom lines one day into a homicide investigation. “So far, not a lot to help you out,” he said, then held up the notebook in his hand. Green recognized it as the English notebook in Lea's backpack. “We were up half the night going through this—not a trace of semen or blood, and the only prints I could find were Lea's. She sure liked her Shakespeare.”

“Let me see it.” Green reached out, and Cunningham passed over the book. Green flipped through it rapidly. Lea wrote with a feminine but confident hand, without any of the hearts and curlicues that were popular with teenage girls. He scanned the notes and short essays, recognizing quotes from Shakespeare and, in amazing contrast,
The Catcher in the Rye.
The whole back section of the book was filled with sonnets. Some were in Old English, others clearly in the style of the romantic poets. But were they all copies, or were some of them written by Lea herself? It would take time to tell which was which, and even more time to distill from the flowery language any hidden clues.

While all the field detectives were running around in the heat tracking down ice cream vendors and used condoms, this was a task he could easily take on himself.

Green's Shakespeare was very rusty. Throughout the requisite Shakespearean plays in high school, he'd been an indifferent student, rarely paying attention in class and even more rarely actually reading the plays that were assigned. He was more likely to know a Monty Python take-off on the great soliloquies than he was to have memorized the real thing.

In university, he'd avoided English wherever possible, preferring not to spend entire weeks dissecting the symbolism of some dead poet's impenetrable verse. Fortunately, psychology and criminology caught his attention and steered his urge to fix the world in a tangible direction.

He flipped through the sonnets at the back of the notebook, wondering whose practised eye he could enlist in separating original from invented. He noticed that over half of them sang praises of one fair maiden or another, some unattainable and others already caught in the author's charms.

There were only six sonnets that referred to a male beloved, which made his search much easier. How many female poets were there, and could he tell from the style whether one of them was a modern schoolgirl?

He read the poems thoughtfully. One dwelled in great detail on the powerful arms and tender lips of her lover, another described him as Adonis and two others talked about Romeo. Had Shakespeare written any pieces from a woman's point of view? After about fifteen minutes, he realized that the easiest way to make sense of the poems was to go to the source—Lea's English teacher.

Mrs. Lucas proved only too happy to help. Green caught her during her prep time, marking papers in the staff room. She shook her head dolefully when he mentioned Lea.

“These papers are awful,” she said, waving a dismissive hand towards the stack at her right elbow. Green saw lots of red ink, which brought back unpleasant memories. “The students just can't concentrate. What a tragedy. Poor Lea.”

“Was she a good student?”

“Middling. She was bright enough, but literature wasn't her forte. She loved to write herself, but hadn't the patience to study others.”

It was the first criticism anyone had dared to level at Lea, and Green was intrigued. “Her mother says she wrote poetry.”

“Reams of it. Mostly snippets of memories from Bosnia. And mostly bad. But you only get better by writing.”

“Can you take a look at these poems in her notebook and tell me if any of them were written by her?”

Mrs. Lucas took the notebook and rifled through it. Her eyebrows arched. “Well, these sure aren't Bosnia. She obviously didn't intend any teacher to see this book. Some of this stuff is pretty racy.”

“Which ones did she write?”

“All the last two pages. These are bad imitations of Shakespearean sonnets.” She gestured to four of the six sonnets Green had noted—the one about the powerful arms, the two about Romeo and the Adonis poem. “We've been studying Romeo and Juliet this term, so it makes sense she'd use that metaphor. I don't know where Adonis came from, although Greek mythology is big in teenage culture.”

Green read the first Romeo poem carefully. Unlike Mrs. Lucas, he wasn't interested in artistic merit but in details that might identify the boy.

O what's the future for my love and me?
Our fortunes united or forever torn apart?
The hopes and love of kin a kind of tyranny
That controls the very beating of his heart.
How like a god he towers over me,
Our arms entwined, our eyes in passion locked.
His clouded gaze laments of cares too worldly
While mine of secret love alone doth talk.
O that he could toss all cares and worry aside,
And drink the sweetness of life's most virgin gift.
Forget his warrior duty and others' pride.
And let the demands of morning come not swift.
O Romeo, tonight shall passion meet no earthly bars,
As we chase our dreams across the canopy of stars.

“Pretty uplifting,” Mrs. Lucas remarked, reading over his shoulder. “Most teenagers write such profoundly depressing stuff about love.”

Green glanced at her wryly. “That's because it's usually going badly. Lea sounds like she's got a more optimistic take.”

“That's Lea. Always full of hope.”

“Any idea who she was writing about?”

The teacher shrugged. “I doubt the adolescent male in question bears much resemblance to the demi-god described here.”

Green smiled. The voice of experience. Too many years, too much teenage angst. No doubt she was right, but there was still much to be gleaned from the poems nonetheless. He left her to her marking and went out to his car where he could think in peace. Taking out a notepad, he jotted down the points.

1. Questionable future together—family pressures and expectations.
   High achieving family?
   
2. Towers over her—tall.
   
3. Less committed than her—distracted by above ambitions?
   
4. She wanted him to forget all else, put her first.
   
5. Something special that night—seduction, loss of virginity,
   something else?
   

He paused, considering the veiled references of the last six lines. How recently had the poem been written? Was the special night in fact the night she had died? And did the sweetness she was offering refer to something more than her own body?

His cell phone rang, startling him out of his deep thought. It was Gibbs, sounding diffident as always.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir. Staff Sergeant Sullivan s-suggested I give you a call.”

“What's up, Bob?”

“I'm at Pleasant Park High School conducting interviews with the victim's friends—you know, trying to
ID
the boyfriend?”

Gibbs didn't sound as if he'd broken open the case, but nowadays nothing much excited him. Green's hopes rose. “Did you find him?” he interrupted.

“No, sir. So far, no one seems to know. All her girlfriends, even her ex-boyfriend—”

Green perked up. “Who's he?”

“A Grade Twelve acting student named Justin Wakefield. But it doesn't sound like it was very serious. They broke up in April.”

Two months was not a long time in the healing of a broken heart, Green thought. “What do we know about this guy?” “Not much yet, sir. He's very popular in the school and their leading actor. People say he's multi-talented—writes, acts, directs. Kind of like a young Paul Gross. Probably has girls falling all over him since they broke up.”