Dream Chasers (21 page)

Gibbs was already at his computer, a rare excitement lighting his face as his fingers flew over the keys. “I-I've been chasing down drug leads all weekend, sir. I've got a great new idea!”

“Did you ever leave that desk, Bob?” A flush crept up Gibbs' long face, and his Adam's apple bobbed. “I spent yesterday with Sue, sir,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “I took her for a drive up in the Gatineau. We had a picnic and w-went around the Sugar Bush Trail. It's got handicapped access. She tried to walk the whole way, but...” He didn't need to finish the sentence. Sue Peters was in rehab, relearning how to walk, but she fatigued easily. Being Sue, she did not take this failure of her body lightly.

“That's progress, Bob. Don't lose sight of that.”

“Yes, sir. But she gets so angry, she ends up in tears. It's— it's hard to watch.”

Particularly hard since the old Sue Peters would have hated the tears and would have hated even more that others were witness to them.

“We'll get her back, Bob. Remember what the doctors said. Her brain is still healing, and the more we stimulate it, the better.”

“I know,” Gibbs said, and his voice grew lighter. “That's why I told her about the case. I thought it might lift her spirits to know what we were up to. And it was her that came up with the idea.”

“What idea?”

“Well, you know how you said Lea had a drug source at school? So I got the names of all her friends and the kids in her classes and ran them past our school resource officers to see if they knew who might be dealing in the schools. They checked around, and talked to the vice-principals—they're the ones who really know what's going down in the school. Of course, there was nothing to say it was one of the kids in her classes, but I figured it was a place to start. Anyway, the
VP
s came up with a bunch of possible matches.”

“Was Riley O'Shaughnessy one of them?”

Gibbs looked surprised. “The hockey player?”

Green hesitated, unhappy that he'd let the name slip. But if Bob Gibbs couldn't be trusted to be discreet, no one on the squad could. “It looks like he might have been the secret boyfriend.”

A shadow crossed Gibbs's face which Green couldn't interpret. Dismay? Or hurt at being excluded? He covered it with a brisk shake of his head. “No, he wasn't on the list, but it's a pretty long list. I was planning to start interviewing first thing this morning.”

“But?”

“Well, then Sue had this great idea. Just a long shot. Remember how we had police contact sheets on all the people at Vic McIntyre's parties when the noise complaints were made?”

“Yes, I remember. Riley was one of those. So was his cousin Ben.”

“Sue suggested I cross-reference those to see if any of them went to Pleasant Park and if they were on the list of possible dealers.”

Green smiled broadly. Before her injury, what Sue Peters lacked in finesse and subtlety was compensated by her creative mind and talent for thinking the unthinkable. It was a huge relief to know that talent had not been lost when her skull was crushed. “And?”

“That's what I-I'm doing now, sir. I'm almost done.”

“Good work, Bob.” Gibbs's Adam's apple bobbed again as he worked up to his reply.

“I—I'd like to make sure Sue gets the credit for the idea, sir. A visit from you...to tell her so... That would mean a lot.”

Green cringed. He was touched to think how far Gibbs had come to have the courage for such a request. It was a courage not to be dismissed, but Green hated hospitals. He'd visited Sue half a dozen times in the past two months, but each visit took him days to psych himself up for and to recover from. He dreaded the sight of badly damaged bodies struggling to gain back the functions that had once been second nature.

“I will. Soon,” he replied, grateful to spot Brian Sullivan coming off the elevator, bearing two Tim Hortons doubledoubles. Sullivan jerked his head towards Green's office. Once inside, Sullivan kicked the door shut with his foot, signalling a desire for privacy.

“Okay,” he said, propping his huge feet on Green's desk and prying the lid off his cup. “How'd it go yesterday?”

Between mouthfuls of bagel, Green filled him in on the meagre harvest from his Gananoque visit. “It wasn't a total loss,” he said. “I learned that Riley is a basket case over Lea's death, that McIntyre is pulling all the strings, and that the mother doesn't like that one bit.”

“Did you meet Dad?”

“Yeah, once he got home from church.” Green sorted through his impressions. “A bitter man.”

Sullivan snorted. “Church? Doesn't sound like any O'Shaughnessys I know. Maybe the good Irish boy's got religion all of a sudden. More likely putting money in the bank with the Big Guy so he'll look kindly on Riley in the draft. Catholics still believe that stuff, you know. We may act all rational, but give us a wish, and we're down on our knees doing Novenas faster than you can say Hail Mary. Dad thinks McIntyre is the Second Coming, by the way. I ran into Darren O'Shaughnessy at the hockey picnic yesterday, and we talked some more. His brother sees Riley as the brass ring that's going to set them all up in a fancy house on the river, with a monster boat to cruise the Great Lakes and winter vacations in Florida instead of running his shitty little snow ploughing business. He's out at five a.m. in the pitch black on a freezing January morning, clearing laneways so the rich can get their Beemers out in time for work. Darren says Ted was always looking for a shortcut, but instead found himself saddled with one son, four daughters and a wife with
MS
, scrabbling for a buck any way he can.”

Green picked sesame seeds off his desk thoughtfully as he recalled Noreen O'Shaughnessy's awkward movements the day before. He felt a twinge of sorrow for the woman and moderated his judgment of Riley's father. The man had a lot on his plate. Green remembered his muttered curse when Riley arrived with the Mustang, his sad expression on the stairs. “I think privately he has his doubts. Or maybe just jealousy. But I don't think we can count on him to pry Riley away from McIntyre.”

“There's too much riding on it.” “Or he's afraid of losing Riley altogether. But the kid's eighteen. We can bring him in for formal questioning any time we want.”

Sullivan swirled his coffee in slow, pensive circles. “Do we have enough yet? Yeah, we have him with Lea the night she died, but we've got nothing to tie him to her body or even the park bench. We've got gaps between the time she died and the time she got thrown—” His cell phone rang, and he fumbled at his belt to retrieve it. As he listened, his expression grew alert. After a brief conversation, he thanked the caller for the hard work and hung up.

“All right!” he crowed. “That was the lab. The marijuana roaches Cunny found at the scene? They were laced with crystal meth. Enough to give you a real buzz, and if you took too many, to stop your heart cold. Six roaches were found at the scene. More than enough, the lab says.”

Green thought about the methamphetamine in her tox results. “So she did die because she bought laced marijuana.”

“From someone who obviously didn't know what they were doing.”

“Or someone who wanted her dead.”

Sullivan stared at him. “That's a stretch. They might just as easily have knocked out Riley too. In fact, they probably would have if he wasn't so anti-drugs.”

Green tapped his pen impatiently on his desk. “Anyway, we now know the how of her death, if not the why. And Gibbs is working on the who—the supplier. If this was some amateur who didn't know what the hell they were doing—” He jumped to his feet and flung open his office door. Gibbs was still at his computer, jotting notes on a pad.

“Bob! Any progress?”

“Yessir!” Gibbs snatched up his notepad and loped towards them. “A couple of interesting prospects. One is Ben O'Shaughnessy—with that name, I figure he's related to Riley?”

“His cousin.” Green perked up. “He's a dealer?”

“No, he's not on the suspects list for that, but he is in Lea's English class, and he was at one of McIntyre's parties.”

Sullivan was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing. “His father mentioned he liked to party.”

“Motive?” Green asked.

“In these families, with this much competition, who knows?” Sullivan replied, and Green knew he meant old Irish Valley families. Sullivan was the expert on how twisted the roots could become. “Good, old-fashioned jealousy? Riley was certainly the golden boy, got all the success and attention. And all the girls. Good work, Bob. Keep digging on him.”

Gibbs nodded. He looked more excited than Green had seen him in weeks. “But I've got someone even more interesting! I got one hit on all three counts. I've found a kid who was a friend of Lea's from her Outdoor Ed class, who was on the list of possible dealers at the school, and—” his eyes sparkled, “who was present at Vic McIntyre's party.”

“And who is this sonofabitch?”

“Daughter of a bitch. Girl by the name of Crystal Adams. Sixteen years old, and not a mark against her except that witness contact. The vice principal wasn't even sure if she's a dealer, but the rumours are there. Small time, friends only, he thinks.”

An amateur, thought Green in disgust. A fucking amateur.

They sent Gibbs away, ostensibly to research background on Crystal Adams, but actually so they could argue in private over what to do next. Sullivan wanted to go straight to Crystal, but Green wanted to tackle Riley.

“Until Gibbs gets us more details,” Green said, “we've got nothing concrete to tie her to that night. We've got rumours she's dealing and evidence she was at McIntyre's party, but that's it. Until we get the
DNA
from those roaches, we can't even prove it was the marijuana that killed Lea. Crystal is a minor, and the minute we lean on her, we'll have her parents down our backs. If she's not smart enough to see we've got nothing, they will be.”

Sullivan looked skeptical. He propped his big feet on the desk, drained the last of his coffee and lobbed the cup over Green's desk towards the waste basket. It hit the floor and rolled under the desk. Green grinned. “I moved it. I got tired of your perfect record.”

Without a word, Sullivan scooped the cup from the floor and lobbed it again, this time directly into the basket. “The same thing could be said about Riley, only Vic McIntyre will have the smartest lawyer in town on our ass. I think we should lean on Crystal. Scare her into telling us who sold her the adulterated marijuana. She's not going to like staring at a possible homicide charge, and I think her parents will be smart enough to figure that out.”

“We could always pick them both up,” Green said with a grin. “Hedge our bets, play them against each other.”

Sullivan laughed and was just drawing breath to respond when his phone rang. All traces of levity vanished as he listened, and after a couple of moments he said three simple words: “Be right there.”

When he hung up, he was already shrugging on his jacket. His expression was grim. “We've got another body. No doubt about how this one died.”

Bruce Pit had once been a sand quarry on the outskirts of the city but was now surrounded by suburbs and bounded by major city roads and highways. It was an overgrown scrubland officially designated as an off-leash dog park with a network of trails through the fields and the adjacent woodland. There were several official access points, including a large parking lot on the west side, but the first officer on the scene directed Sullivan to a field off Hunt Club Road. It was at the remote southern edge of the park, he said, but closest to the body.

“The murderer sure as hell didn't know anything about dogs,” Green observed as Sullivan bumped the car over the uneven grass towards the collection of vehicles in the middle of the field. A brilliant June sun shone in the cloudless sky, baking the ground. “There must be two hundred dogs that pass though Bruce Pit every day. A buried body would be heaven for every one of them.”

“Maybe he just didn't know Bruce Pit was an off-leash dog park. Not everybody has dogs, Green. Maybe he just figured, wow, here's a nice, isolated place to ditch this body. Convenient if you don't want to drive too far with a body stashed in your trunk.”

Up ahead, Green could make out an ambulance as well as Coroner and Ident vans, and through the trees beyond, flashes of moving white. Alongside one of the cruisers, a uniformed officer was waiting for them.

“We've closed off the entire park, sir,” he explained when Sullivan showed his badge. “There are still lots of walkers on the trails, but we're interviewing each one as they come out.”

Sullivan nodded his approval. “Where is she?”

The officer led them to the edge of the woods. About a hundred yards in, Green could now distinguish the unruly white hair of Dr. Alexander MacPhail, as well as the bulky outline of Lou Paquette. Under the canopy of trees, the air was hot and moist. A whiff of decay drifted past Green's nostrils, churning his stomach and telling him the body had been there some time.

“A man and his dog found her,” the officer was saying. “Mr. Reg Talbot, lives in the neighbourhood. We've got his preliminary statement, but he's over there—” he nodded to one of the police cruisers, “if you want to speak to him. We had the paramedics check him out, on account of his age.”

Sullivan glanced at Green. “I want a look at the body first.”

“I'll talk to him,” Green replied quickly. Hysterical witnesses were infinitely preferable to rotting bodies. He found Reg Talbot in the back of the squad car, clutching a paper cup of vile-smelling coffee and huddled under a blanket despite the heat. Beside him, a small white terrier panted with excitement, steaming up the windows. The man started when Green opened the door, and beneath his leathery, liver-spotted skin, he was paper white. His eyes were huge.