Honour Among Men (31 page)

“This is all just coincidence and speculation,” Charbonneau protested. “You don't actually know anything.”

Green nodded. “That's right, and that's why you're here. To clear him, or to expose him. Let's hope I'm wrong, but remember, if he's guilty, he betrayed Sue.” He waited a moment for that message to sink in, then resumed quietly. “We have five tasks to complete. First, we have to find something more than coincidence to tie him to the case. Charbonneau and Leblanc, I want you to prepare a photo line-up with Weiss in it, then pay a visit to a witness named Hassim Mohammed, a manager at the Tim Hortons on Bank Street.” He handed over the photo he'd taken from Weiss's file. “Ask Mr. Mohammed to
ID
the man who was asking about Twiggy. And get going, because the next steps hinge on that
ID
.”

The tension in the room eased as the detectives focussed on the job. Charbonneau and Leblanc jotted some notes and rose
to go. “Have you got a home address? It's Sunday.”

Green read off the address. “Nice cooperative guy with a soft spot for Twiggy, but he's a bit jumpy, so go easy on him.”

The two detectives rolled their eyes before hustling from the room.

“Second, search warrants—”

The door burst open, and Gibbs rushed in, his face flushed and his eyes shining. “Sorry I'm late, sir. I was just waiting to confirm something up in Petawawa. That mystery cellphone? I just got the phone log on it, and it received a call about two minutes before the call went to the bartender at the King's Arms—” He stopped, looking flustered. “I mean, whoever called the Petawawa bartender to set up Sue? He got a call two minutes earlier from another phone.”

“We got that, Bob,” Sullivan said patiently.

Gibbs grinned sheepishly. “That other phone? It was a payphone in a convenience store just down the street from Sue. One of the places Jeff Weiss would have been canvassing at the time she was attacked.”

Silence descended as the grim implications set in. Had one of their own really set her up for the kill? Or received instructions to do it himself?

Green spoke first. “Good work, Bob. We'll have to tie Weiss to that call, so send the Petawawa
OPP
the same photo line-up and get them to follow up with the staff at the store. Meanwhile, it's more ammunition for our search warrants. We need two—one to access Weiss's phone records, both cell and landlines, and another to search his house. Jones, you're the search warrant genius. You and Wells get started on the paperwork. We'll have to wait till Mohammed's positive
ID
before we finalize it.”

Jones was nodding as he scribbled in his notebook. “What are we looking for?”

“Jean Calderone.
AKA
Twiggy. And/or evidence she's been there.”

Jones stopped writing and looked up in surprise. “He wouldn't be stupid enough to take her to his house.”

“No, but it gets us in the door, and we'll have to search everywhere very thoroughly to find evidence of her, like fingerprints and stray hairs. And while we're searching, who knows what else we might turn up.”

Soft chuckles rippled through the room.

“You should also add stuff like clothing and shoes, for traces of blood, dirt from the crime scenes, you know the drill. We'll seize every stitch of clothing he owns if we have to.”

For a few minutes they ironed out the contents and timing of the search warrants. Both detectives recorded everything in their notebooks, but Green didn't make a single entry to the official case file. Too many eyes had access. Once the detectives had headed out to complete their job, Green entered a short note on his own disk. Sullivan watched him in silence, and Green was grateful he made no comment. He needed no reminder how fragile a limb he was climbing out on. He looked up at the remaining detectives.

“Next, we need to keep track of Weiss while we get all these pieces in place. Wallington and Connors, I want you to locate him and keep him in your sights at all times. And whatever you do, don't tip him off till we're ready to bring the bastard in.”

After the two had left, Green looked across at Gibbs, who was now alone with Sullivan in the room. Gibbs was looking at him expectantly.

“What's the news on Sue?” Green asked.

“The nurses say she's the same. But I think she knows I'm there. I'm sure she squeezed my hand.” Gibbs flushed and shifted his lanky frame restlessly. “What's my assignment, sir?”

Gibbs looked as if he hadn't slept in days. In his time off, he'd kept a vigil at Peters' bedside, never giving up hope that she'd open her eyes. Green knew he should send the young man home to bed, but he also knew Gibbs needed to be here, fighting on Peters' behalf. Green told him about his fruitless conversation with Ian MacDonald's mother. “After you send the
OPP
Weiss's photo, I want you back on the computer finding out the name and location of every member of Blakeley's sweep team. Soldiers, medics and police. We need to confirm the connection between Weiss and MacDonald, and if possible find out what the hell happened over there.”

Results began to pour in very fast. First to report in were Charbonneau and Leblanc, so excited with their success that they phoned in from their car outside Hassim Mohammed's house.

“He nailed him, sir!” Leblanc exclaimed. “Took a good long look at each one, hesitated only a few seconds, and picked out Weiss.”

“Even with the sunglasses?”

“Even so. It was the wide forehead and the cheekbones, he said.”

Green felt a peculiar surge of emotion. Part triumph that they were closing in on the culprit, part outrage that he was proving to be one of their own. He realized that he'd been hoping against hope that Weiss would be exonerated, and that it would prove to be just one of those crazy coincidences that plague detective work from time to time. But there was no imaginable reason why Weiss would be inquiring about Twiggy unless he was somehow connected to the case. Moreover, Weiss
was the only one of their suspects who would have known that Twiggy was a potential witness to the murder, because he had seen her at the scene that morning, giving her statement to the police.

“What did you do with her, you bastard?” Green asked himself after he'd thanked the detectives. Twiggy had apparently dropped off the face of the earth. The uniformed patrols had turned up no sign of her, and the questioning of street people at her favourite haunts had yielded nothing. Among her usual hangouts, the only place she could have gone without anyone seeing her was the art gallery, because no one had dared return there since the murder. It was the one place she would have gone to wait for Green. It was also the one place, however, where Weiss would have known to look for her.

Green cursed the twist of fate that had intervened to prevent him from meeting her. If he'd gone there Friday at sunset as she'd asked, she would be safe today. On Friday Weiss was in Petawawa, his whereabouts accounted for until well into the night. Therefore, if he'd snatched her, he had not done so until some time Saturday morning. When the bastard had called in sick and was supposedly at home recovering from his trauma.

The trauma of setting up his partner to be killed.

The call from the Petawawa
OPP
came in fast on the heels of Leblanc's call. The convenience store owner remembered Weiss coming in to ask questions about a woman, whom the store owner claimed he never saw, then using the payphone on his way out. Asked about Weiss's demeanour, the store owner said he seemed distracted, and he'd glanced out the window several times during the interview. The phone call was brief, no more than two minutes, after which he had headed next door to the pizza restaurant.

To his credit, the
OPP
investigator had pressed for further details about the call. Had Weiss known the number by heart, or had he looked it up? If so, in what? The store owner recalled that he'd consulted a piece of paper from his breast pocket, which was hardly surprising, Green thought, since it was a private cell number not found in any book. Had Weiss made more than one call? No, the owner assured him. A two-minute call, tops, and he'd gone on his way.

Two minutes was plenty of time to tip someone off and set the assault in motion. Green still had that nagging suspicion that Weiss was merely a bit player, a conduit whose strings were being pulled by the real villain in the case. Who? And why was Weiss cooperating? What did the killer have on him that he could coerce an otherwise dedicated officer to betray his oath of service and the very colleagues he worked with?

In less than an hour, Wallington and Connors phoned in to report on their surveillance efforts at Weiss's home. Green already feared what they were going to say. The curtains were drawn, the doors were locked, and the pick-up truck registered in his name was missing from the drive. Weiss was not there.

Of course he's not, thought Green in frustration, because he's gone into hiding somewhere. The question was whether he had Twiggy with him, or whether her body had already been dumped.

“We've checked with the neighbours on all sides, and no one has seen him since early Friday morning,” Connors said. “One of the neighbours phoned his home and his cellphone at our request and got no answer.”

“What about mail in the mailbox?”

“It was empty, sir.”

So either he received none on Friday, or he picked it up sometime after returning from the hospital Friday night,
Green thought. Had he received orders to snatch Twiggy at that time, or had he been trying to find her since Thursday and had struck it lucky at the art gallery on Saturday morning because she'd still been waiting for Green?

Stop going there, he chided himself. It serves nothing but to cloud your objectivity, which is already clouded enough.

“Do you want us to set up a stake-out, sir?”

Wallington's question stopped his spiralling thoughts. Weiss had to be found, even if they had to look under every rock. “Yes. Get that neighbour's cooperation to do surveillance on the
QT
from his place, and interview all the neighbours again to see if any of them know where he might go to get away from things. Relatives, a fishing lodge, a cottage . . . anything like that. Also work up a list of known associates. I'll put some guys on that from this end as well.”

“And if Weiss comes back?”

Green thought about that for less than five seconds. Weiss had proved too elusive to risk losing him all over again, along with all chance of finding Twiggy and catching the other players in the game. “Apprehend the bastard and bring him in.”

“On what charges?”

“I'll be working on that.”

After he hung up, Green sat at his desk a moment, pondering that very question. He was about to arrest a fellow police officer and bring him in. All hell would break loose at that moment, from the police chief and Barbara Devine on down to the Police Association. He needed to know what was going on before he committed himself to an action that would be dissected for months, possibly years to come. He needed to know whether Weiss was the ruthless mastermind, or some small player caught in a web way beyond his control.

Green had always prided himself on his intuition, and after
twenty years in the trenches, he'd witnessed human distress in all its varied guises. Weiss's behaviour at the hospital on Friday had been unusual in its extreme, but his distress had seemed real. Only a very gifted actor could summon up the pallor, the trembling and the tears on cue.

Whatever part Weiss had played, however willingly he had played it, something was tearing him up inside. He was not the cold, calculating person Green had imagined the killer to be. He was conflicted, desperate and unpredictable, which made him dangerous not only to himself and to the Twiggy, but to the ruthless killer who was pulling his strings.

And that killer was almost certainly smart enough to realize that.

Sept. 1, 1993. A beach somewhere in Sector South, Croatia
.

Dear Kit . . . It was good to hear from you finally. We've been moving around a lot, so I'm not sure where we are, or what we're doing here. Mostly keeping an eye on Serb troop movements, counting artillery fire, and waiting for the order to move when the Croat withdrawal agreement is signed. The Hammer has us doing a lot of
PT
, humping up and down the mountain with our packs so we won't get soft. And drills. Man, am I sick of drills and cleaning the guns
.

We're in a town on the coast that's pretty deserted, so we have our choice of houses. Danny moved our section into this big old mansion. Most of the furniture's been looted, but there are beds for all of us. Beds! The first night I slept on one, I didn't sleep a wink. I still feel like I'm in that bunker on the hill. It's hard to shake that, and just relax
.

I've been thinking about home a lot, now that it's getting close. I'll have lots of money saved when I get back, but I think I'd like some time off, just to hang out at the farm and help my folks. Maybe I'll be ready for vet school next year, but it all feels a long way off
.