Fifth Son (12 page)

“Sorry, sir. I thought everyone was finished here.”

“Where the hell were you?” Green countered. “This scene is supposed to be secure.”

“Ident released it this afternoon, sir. I was just clearing things up.” The young man's forehead puckered. “Is that a problem, sir?”

Green shook his head. Cunningham was as obsessive and meticulous a forensics specialist as Green had ever encountered. He and his partner had had two days to process the scene and if Cunningham said they were done, they were done. Besides, that meant Green could finally prowl around all he wanted.

Green hastened to reassure the officer before dispatching him to continue his clean-up. Once the officer had disappeared back around the bell tower, Green returned his attention to the key in the padlock. The mechanism was badly rusted, and for a few moments the key wouldn't budge, but finally, with one strong twist, the lock clicked open. As Green unhooked the padlock and slowly pulled open the door, a wave of cold, musty air rushed over him.

He stepped through into the interior, rendered dank and gloomy by the boarded windows. Slivers of sunlight pierced through the cracks and cut shafts through the dusty air. There was a small ante-chamber with a table and a door off to the right, presumably to the bell tower. Beyond the ante-chamber, the church opened into a rectangular sanctuary with a vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by thick, black beams. Green's footsteps echoed on the stone floor as he walked the length of the interior. It had been stripped bare of furnishings except for a black wood stove sitting in the corner with an empty wood box beside it and a rusty axe propped against the wall. Over the altar hung a plain wooden cross. Green stood a moment before the altar, trying to picture the room full of pews and people, with the mischievous Reverend Taylor ministering to his flock and the Pettigrew family swaying happily to the hymns.

Green turned slowly in place. Lawrence had the key to this church in his treasure chest. Stolen, or freely lent? Reverend Taylor had a soft spot for society's lost souls. Perhaps it was the key Lawrence was searching for in the Boisvert yard that morning. But since he'd been scared away before finding it, then how had he gained access to the church?

The lure of the unanswered questions—the how and why— drew Green like a magnet. He walked back through the sanctuary towards the bell tower, trying to gather the few fragments he'd learned about Lawrence into some form of understanding. He needed to get inside the man's head, to see those last few moments of his life as Lawrence had seen them. But as Green entered the tower, he sucked in his breath with dismay. Dim daylight slipped in through the arched openings where the cast-iron bell hung, but otherwise the tower was dark. Fastened to the interior stone wall was a metal ladder which reached up past the massive bell to a trap door above. The climb was probably thirty feet; to Green it looked like a hundred.

Just contemplating it made him dizzy. He'd hated heights ever since his childhood, when his friends had made a game of chasing each other up the rickety fire escapes and over the tenement rooftops of Lowertown. He'd slipped, breaking his collarbone and subjecting himself to weeks of painful immobility. Now his palms turned slick and his legs jellied as he gripped the bars. The silence was broken only by the cooing of pigeons up above and the pulse of his own heartbeat in his ears. He was so alone. Surely, it was unwise to make the climb with no one there to get help should he fall, or should the ladder break away from its rusty anchors and crash to the ground.

He shook the bars to test the ladder's stability. Flakes of debris floated down, but the ladder was rock solid. “Coward,” he muttered aloud, and the curse echoed around him. If the Ident team could go up and down the ladder half a dozen times, then so could he.

Gingerly, he planted his foot on the bottom rung and began his ascent. He kept his body pressed to the wall and his eyes fixed on the stones in front of him, forcing his feet to follow one step after another. Soon he was level with the old bell, which hung motionless in the fading light. Lawrence might have found this seclusion comforting, but when the bell rang it would have been deafening inside this small space.

Green raised his eyes to the trap door and felt his stomach churn. He would have to hold on with one hand and pry open the door with the other. Fear hammered in his ears as he forced himself upwards. The platform above was wooden but supported on all sides by a small stone ledge. Glued to the wall, he groped overhead to feel the contours of the door, found the hinge, the opposite edge, the slight gap where the door abutted the floor. He pushed. Nothing. The goddamn door weighed a ton. He gritted his teeth, leaned into it and pushed again. It lifted six inches before slamming back down with such force it nearly knocked him off the ladder. He clutched the bars, gasping for breath. What the fuck am I doing, he thought. I'm not some muscle-bound farmer used to tossing bales of hay into the barn. I'm a pencil pusher, for God's sake. Much as I hate it, much as I mock it, I spend most of my days on the phone or on my ass in a committee room chair. Even when I was a kid, my idea of serious exercise was jumping my bike over the potholes on Nelson Avenue.

But I'm here. I've come this far and going down will be even worse than going up. If I go up one more step so I can get my shoulders and back behind the push, maybe I can work a miracle.

He pushed, grunted, pried and slowly forced the door up far enough to wedge it open with the stick that had obviously been left inside for that purpose. Not daring to look down, he crawled through the opening and rolled over onto the roof.

Late afternoon sun nearly blinded him. He lay on his back, blinking at the blue sky and thanking God for the feel of solid wood beneath him. On all sides, the stone parapet was covered with lichen and stained with a century of bird droppings. He stood up in disgust, wiping the stains off his jacket as he surveyed the scene.

The stone wall rose to about hip level, affording a sense of both security and privacy. Down below him on one side lay the village square, the cars catching the sunlight as they cruised down the main road. On the other side stretched a view of golden trees and vast fields bisected by the river. In the distance, if he looked hard, he could just make out the reddish smudge of the Boisvert's old farmhouse. A person could stand here virtually unseen, divorced from the world below and yet witness to it all. A spymaster's dream.

Here the teenage Lawrence could have sat in isolation, safety and peace. At the top of God's house, in the palm of God's hand. Here, sharing this private spot with his favourite feathered creatures, his angels of God, he could have spied on the world, seen who went where in the village, who came and went through the oak door below.

He would have felt all-knowing, all-powerful. Perhaps even messianic.

Was that what had lured him back all these years later? Not a girl but a yearning to reconnect with his spiritual past, to capture once more the power and inspiration that this special place had given him in his troubled youth? Perhaps when he first left Brockville six weeks ago, he had simply wanted to come home, but as his medication wore off and his delusions gained hold, had he remembered this sanctuary, where he communed with the angels and talked directly to his God? Perhaps he hadn't been looking for the old love notes at all when Isabelle Boisvert spotted him, but for the antique key that would get him back in here.

A century of ice and rain had gouged deep cracks in the wall. Green examined the spot where the top had crumbled. MacPhail was right; a mere few inches had broken away, hardly enough to cause an accidental fall. Furthermore, anyone trying to force a person over the wall would have a major task lifting them over the lip and preventing them from scratching and kicking everything within sight. Yet there were no signs of a struggle. The lichen was nearly undisturbed, and many loose pieces of stone were still in place.

It looked as if Lawrence's jump had been intentional, and Green felt a wave of sorrow for the man. What had happened? Had God failed to come to him? Had he suddenly realized the futility of it all? Twenty years later, looking not through the rosy lens of an impressionable, delusional teenager but through the dimmed lens of a burned out schizophrenic, had he realized he would never hear God, and that his angels were nothing more than pigeons pecking out a pointless existence on a smelly little roof?

A pigeon swooped in, landed on the wall opposite him and fixed him with beady eyes. Green watched it a moment, wondering if Lawrence had seen it that afternoon, read meaning into its random pecking at the lichen and into its frankly hostile stare. Then the bird shook its wings, gave a soft coo and lifted off again, sailing high above the square.

Green tracked it until it was nothing but a white speck over the distant trees. Such freedom. Had Lawrence watched it fly away, felt the tug of freedom as Green had. What was it the St. Lawrence supervisor had said? That after twenty years in hospital, several hundred electroshocks, and a ton of mind-numbing drugs, Lawrence had very few brain cells left? Had he thought, in his primitive, child-like way, that he could fly free like the birds? Spread his imaginary wings and fly straight up to heaven?

The sun dipped below the horizon, sapping the warmth from the air and bringing Green back to reality with a jolt. He reached out his hand to steady himself. Shook his head incredulously at his own folly. What was it about this place that unleashed such spiritual ravings? He was an investigator, not a psychic trying to communicate with the dead. This was a crime scene, not a seance.

Green leaned over the edge of the wall and peered cautiously down at the spot where Lawrence had fallen. The grass all around had been trampled, and blood still stained the stones. He remembered the photo of the body splayed in the grass, and now, looking down from above, he realized something was odd. Why would the head be facing the tower rather than out? If Lawrence had jumped of his own accord, he should have fallen feet first and pitched forward so that his head was facing out. To have landed face down with his head towards the tower, he would have had to twist in mid flight. Green had never known a jumper to do that.

As he leaned over, the rough surface of the wall scraped his suit. He backed away, brushing mortar dust and lichen from the front of his jacket. At once, another inconsistency struck, him. The back of Lawrence's jacket had snagged on the inner edge of the wall. But if Lawrence had been preparing to jump, he would probably have stood facing outward to clamber up onto the wall, in which case he'd be more likely to snag the front hem of his jacket rather than the back. If he'd then swung himself over the wall and sat on the edge, perhaps gathering the courage to jump, he'd be more likely to catch the back hem on the outer edge of the wall, not the inner.

They were minuscule inconsistencies, certainly not enough to dispute the suicide idea altogether. It was possible the man had hoisted himself backwards over the wall, or that his back hem had draped over the entire top of the wall as he slid off the edge. But there was a much more obvious way the back hem of his jacket could have snagged on the inner edge of the wall. If the man had his back to the wall and had pressed hard against it. Perhaps been pushed with enough force to rip the fabric.

They were very thin threads on which to hang a murder theory. But as long as they were there, he owed it to Lawrence to follow it through. After he returned the tin can to the evidence room, he'd get all the latest intelligence from the troops, and he'd go home to Sharon.

Now more than ever, he needed her sane, experienced understanding of the deranged mind.

When Green finally made it back downtown, it was past six. He dropped into the forensics lab in the hope of finding Cunningham still at work over his fingerprint files, but there was no one there. He tagged Lawrence's tin can back into the evidence room and left a requisition for Cunningham to fingerprint every item in it and to send the reddish stain to the
RCMP
lab for analysis. Any fingerprints and blood were to be matched to the dead man. Another small step towards unravelling the mystery, thought Green as he prepared to go home.

One final minor detour, he promised himself as he made his way up to his office. Just to see what the troops have uncovered. Both Gibbs and Sullivan had gone home, but their email updates were waiting for him, along with Dr. MacPhail's preliminary findings from the post mortem. Gibbs reported, with his usual apologies, that he was still waiting for word on Tom Pettigrew from the Toronto officer who'd released him, and that he had no useful leads on Derek's disappearance. Berkeley, California, had responded snippily that according to its archived records Derek Pettigrew had been accepted but hadn't registered in his program. To date, all other avenues that Gibbs had explored proved to be dead ends.

Physical examination of the victim's body during the post mortem had revealed no signs of bruising suggestive of coercion or struggling, and although a lot of dirt had been extracted from beneath his fingernails, none had been identified as human tissue. It did not appear as if Lawrence had put up any resistance. Based on the condition of the victim's brain on autopsy, MacPhail refined his estimate on the timing of his death. Death had been caused by extensive intra cranial bleeding due to the trauma sustained in the fall, but that amount of bleeding would likely have taken four hours, give or take. Death most likely occurred between six p.m. and midnight, but the fall probably between two and seven p.m.

Still a big window of time, Green thought, but at least a time when people would have been out in the village, walking their dogs, playing ball or attending Sunday services at the other two churches. It was worth another canvass of the village, with a focus on that time span. Sullivan's email expressed the very same thought. Inquiries would resume in the morning.

A later email from Sullivan, logged shortly before five o'clock, reported that the St. Lawrence group home supervisor had been unable to make a positive
ID
from the dead man's photo. Mrs. Hogencamp thought it could be Lawrence, but she didn't recognize the clothes, and on a matter as crucial as a man's death, she was not willing to commit herself. Green flipped through his notebook for the supervisor's number. As he reached for the phone, he glanced at his watch. Nearly seven o'clock. Sharon would have long since given up waiting for him and would have fed herself and the children dinner, assuming she had a kitchen in which to prepare it. Bob had skipped yesterday, leaving both fridge and stove in the middle of the floor, but had returned with a vengeance this morning, bringing a crew of four and a truck full of cabinets. A promising sign, Green had thought at the time.