None So Blind (15 page)

Green wrestled with an increasing sense of incongruence. “Anything strike you as unusual about this scene, Lyle?”

“Unusual?” Cunningham pulled off his glasses. “I give you the facts and leave the speculation to you guys.”

“But there are not a lot of facts to process.”

“True. The guy had only been there a few hours. Hadn’t even unpacked.”

“Did you see any evidence that it had been cleaned up?”

“It was clean, that’s all I can say.”

“Recently swept? Counters sponged down?

Cunningham hesitated. “Yes.”

“And didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Maybe he was cleaning it up after the winter. Mouse droppings, spider webs — all kinds of creatures move in over the winter.”

“When he was planning to kill himself within hours?”

Cunningham clamped his mouth shut as if realizing too late that he had been drawn into speculation.

Green turned to Sullivan. “Levesque needs to find out whether the property management team employs cleaners and when the place was last cleaned.”

Sullivan nodded. “She’s on top of that. Her sidekick checked, as I recall. The company had renters lined up for the month of June, so they had a team in there opening up the place two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks. How much dust can accumulate in two weeks?”

Cunningham shrugged, unwilling to commit. “Depends how airtight the place is. I’d say that old place is full of chinks.”

“Enough that there should have been a fine layer of dust — and this time of year, tree pollen — on the floor. Was there?”

The Ident officer’s eyes flickered. Settling his glasses back on his nose, he scrolled back through the photos, enlarging, comparing. Slowly he grew red. “In the bedrooms. Not in the kitchen or living room.”

Green sat back. “
Goddamn it!
”

“Maybe he swept it up.”

“From a wheelchair? A lot of work for his last hours on earth.” Green tapped the last photo on the screen. “This looks staged. Look at the position of the wheelchair, facing out over the view. It just screams, ‘poor guy’s last wish.’ Look at the empty bottles on the floor beside the chair. No glass, implying the guy chugged pure whisky straight from the bottle. The empty pill bottle is under the chair, like it was carelessly dropped. Nothing else in the room. Nothing else in the whole place. Clean as a goddamn whistle.”

He gritted his teeth, trying to keep his rising outrage at bay. “I suppose now that the scene’s been released, every Tom, Dick, and Harry, including the cleaners, has trekked through the house?”

“Well … MacPhail ruled it a suicide.”

“Yes, and he’s next on my list. Meanwhile, get back out there and see what you can salvage. Prints in unusual places, footprints in the dirt, and go over every inch of the man’s wheelchair.”

Cunningham unplugged his flash drive and headed for the door. His face was unreadable but deep red mottled his neck.

“He’s going to blame himself,” Sullivan said quietly once the door had closed.

“We all should,” Green retorted, snatching up his phone to call MacPhail’s private line and putting the call on speaker phone. The pathologist answered after five rings, his brogue unnaturally thick. Green glanced at his watch, which read just after one o’clock. Too early for MacPhail to be impaired, unless he had graduated to liquid lunches.

“You caught me just getting back, laddie,” he said. “Another meeting with James Rosten’s daughter. I think she’s going to take the body.”

Green felt a rush of relief that the body was still in the morgue. “Alex, new evidence has come up. Is there any chance — any marks on the body — to suggest he was forced to take the Scotch?”

“Scotch like that, no one in his right mind would refuse.” MacPhail laughed.

Green waited.

“You’re saying I missed something?”

“No. Just trying to see if there’s another explanation.”

“Because I didn’t, lad.” The brogue grew rougher. Raspier. “I’ve been doing these PMs since before you put on your first uniform.”

“But we all —”

“No defensive wounds, no scratches, no bruising — in the mouth, on the throat, anywhere! — nothing under the fingernails but Tandoori sauce. I don’t read minds, laddie, but I’d say he drank that Scotch willingly.”

“Under threat, perhaps?”

MacPhail snorted. “I don’t read tea leaves either! Why would I even think that? The man was a killer and a cripple, his life in ruins. Why would I go off into the wild blue?”

Green clenched his jaw to hang onto his civility long enough to thank him and get off the phone. He looked at Sullivan grimly.

“He’s piss drunk,” Sullivan said.

Green nodded. “He’s been on the edge for years, but he used to accomplish more dead drunk than the rest of us could sober. This is the first time I think it’s impaired his workday. Fuck, Brian, what if he missed something? What if we all missed something?”

“This isn’t anybody’s fault.”

Green shook his head slowly. “It’s nobody’s fault and it’s all our faults. We let who this man is colour our commitment. He was a killer, supposedly remorseful now, and having trouble adjusting. And because of that, we didn’t see the other possibility. That there is another killer on the loose.”

It was a tense, whirlwind afternoon. First he called the entire team together in an incident room. Photocopies of the note, the death scene, the immaculate cottage, and the discarded bottles were already pinned to the wall, along with the beginnings of a timeline and a list of actions to be pursued.

“We need to treat this as a murder investigation,” he said. “Re-interview every witness, re-examine every fingerprint, re-analyze the residue in the Scotch and pill bottles, review every inch of the pathologist’s report. If Rosten didn’t take the diazepam willingly, look for evidence it was forced or injected.”

He saved the bulk of the investigation for Marie Claire Levesque. She had managed to confirm both neighbours’ statements, but was still waiting for the taxi driver.

“I want to observe that interview,” he said. “We need to find out how Rosten bought the curry and the Scotch and whether any other stops were made along the way. We need to comb through Rosten’s computer, check his search history, and talk to the other Horizon House residents. We need to re-interview all the taxi drivers who drove him in Kingston and Ottawa that day. Find out every word he said to them. Did he mention any places or people, did he ask them any questions? Did he make or receive any phone calls, or make any stops to use a pay phone?

“We need to track down all the first-class customers who saw or spoke to him on the train, and ask them the same questions. I want a complete record of what this guy said and did during the last week of his life.”

Levesque had begun the briefing diligently jotting down every lead Green suggested, but by halfway through she was staring at him in open disbelief, and by the end she tossed her notebook on the table.

Green held his temper. “We need a thorough investigation, Sergeant. I will get you all the help you need — Gibbs and Peters for a start and some uniforms for the Prelims. Belleville Police can handle things at their end.”

Throughout the briefing, Sullivan sat with his chair tipped against the wall and his arms crossed, listening. He interrupted only occasionally to offer suggestions. Midway through, Superintendent Neufeld opened the incident room door and peered in. As usual, not a silver hair was out of place and her dark, tailored suit was impeccable. Her eyebrows shot up in astonishment but she uttered only three words.

“When you’re done, Inspector.”

At the end of the meeting, Sullivan remained behind while the team filed out. “A lot of manpower,” he said quietly. “Neufeld is not going to be pleased.”

“
I’m
fucking not pleased. They screwed it up. So we’re going to do this right this time, Brian. Before memories fade and all the physical evidence is washed away. Neufeld can’t object to that. If there is something there — if Rosten
was
murdered — by God, Brian, there will be hell to pay!”

Sullivan shut the door. “It’s not your fault, Mike.”

Green frowned at him, not needing to ask what he meant. But Sullivan told him anyway. “You didn’t send an innocent man to jail.”

Many thoughts were on the tip of Green’s tongue. An angry dismissal, a protest of innocence, a sputtered denial. But he quelled them all as he sank into his chair.

“I was the original investigating officer. I helped to determine what leads were pursued and what evidence was found. What suspects were identified.”

“Junior investigator, Mike.”

Green grunted in dismissal. “The OPP were obsessed with their random sex killer theory, and tracking down every sex offender on the continent. Remember, this was just after Jerry Paulson led all the police forces in southern Ontario on a merry chase. The media were terrified it was a copycat, and the senior brass wanted to get someone behind bars as soon as possible. DNA had taken nearly two years to nail Paulson and his wife, giving them time to kill three more young women. I’d put Rosten in the frame during the MisPers investigation when I learned she was last seen walking with him to his car. I had all the pieces of the case.” He raised his hand to tick off the points on his fingers. “The exam paper with Rosten’s note with the date of her disappearance jotted beside it; confirmation he’d tutored her at least once; student statements about Rosten’s ego and his flirtatious behaviour. Plus, a cottage neighbour remembered seeing Rosten’s car, and his wife confirmed he’d gone to the cottage that day.

“At first the OPP laughed in my face. Rosten was a successful, professional family man. No one would believe he might also be a killer, until I reminded them about the handsome, charming couple from small-town Ontario who turned out to be serial killers.”

“Paulson and Miranda Jean.”

Green nodded grimly. “Then forensics matched the dirt in Rosten’s jeans and tire treads to the scene. They found a strand of her hair in his car. Suddenly the case blew wide open. The OPP ran with it and nailed down all details. But it was my case, Brian. I connected the dots.”

“You were twenty-seven years old.”

“Which is no excuse. I thought I knew everything back then. I thought I could see through anyone!”

Sullivan studied him thoughtfully. “Fair enough. You were young and cocky. But you didn’t send an innocent man to prison. The Crown attorney prosecuted the case. He —”

“She. Beth Jensen. Now Justice Jensen.”

Sullivan whistled softly. “Okay, so Justice Jensen of the Jugular got the conviction. She could turn even a mediocre case into a winner. And then there was the judge who charged the jury and the jury who convicted him. There are a lot of cogs in our wheels of justice, Mike. Including Rosten’s defence lawyer.”

“The first lawyer was a moron. Some boyhood friend of Rosten’s who didn’t know a thing about criminal law. Rosten fired him halfway through the trial. But the jury would have convicted anyone we told them to. Everyone was still freaked out about that Martins creep who got off on a technicality. Not to mention Miranda Jean pleading battered-wife syndrome after she helped her husband rape and kill those girls.”

Green stared into space, remembering back to that horrific time. The lies, the depravity of the pair, the destruction of public trust. “
I
was freaked out. No one, no matter how normal and upstanding they seemed, was above suspicion. Without me, without my relentless digging up of dirt on James Rosten, he’d be an important professor by now, enjoying a fruitful career and his daughters and grandson.”

“Fine. Beat up on yourself.” Sullivan rose. “We don’t even know that Rosten was murdered, let alone why. It’s a big stretch to say he’s innocent. He might have been killed as payback. But we’ll be turning over every rock between here and Belleville, and on the off chance there is justice to be done for James Rosten, we’ll do it!”

After scheduling a progress meeting for the next morning, Green reluctantly turned to the task he could avoid no longer. Superintendent Neufeld. It was nearly six o’clock but he knew she’d be waiting in her office. He found her sitting in a club chair, with her stocking feet propped on the coffee table and a cup of cold coffee at her elbow. Her own copies of the case reports were strewn on the coffee table in front of her, plastered with Post-it Notes.

She made no effort to take her feet off the table, merely waved him to the chair opposite with a weary flick of her hand. The moment he began his explanation, she let him have it. She was appalled that he was second-guessing the coroner’s verdict and exposing the police service to public outrage, not to mention lawsuits, by casting doubt on an old case.

“All the facts we need are right here in MacPhail’s report,” she said, tapping the top report for emphasis. “No one is questioning any of this but you, Inspector. Why poke a stick into the hornet’s nest that can only end up causing harm?”

He resisted the urge to lecture her about moral obligation and the pursuit of higher justice. Neufeld’s job was to guard the departmental purse strings and the police force’s ass. Few people, certainly not the force’s brass, would see the vindication of Rosten’s name as being worth the cost. Nonetheless, he showed her Rosten’s last letter and sketched the gaps in the investigation he was attempting to fill in, leaving the moral issue unvoiced but implicit.

She listened without a flicker of reaction, and at the end she picked up another file. “You’ve been in charge of Major Cases a long time, haven’t you.”

Alarm bells rang. Was that a shot in the dark, or had Marie Claire Levesque put a bug in her ear? He didn’t reply as he waited for the other shoe to drop.

She thumbed lazily through the other file, which he realized must be his own. “Six years,” she said.

Deliberately he unclenched his jaw and forced himself to be calm. “It takes time to acquire the expertise that’s essential to the position,” he said.

“But it appears you haven’t done much else. Perhaps it’s time for a change. There may be an opening in Support Services.”

He nearly choked. He wanted to shout his objections but instead he dredged his very depths for words that were both persuasive and deferential. “Things are at an extremely sensitive and complicated juncture right now, ma’am. The credibility and professionalism of the Ottawa Police Service will be under scrutiny. I assure you the investigation will be conducted discreetly, but we have to investigate. We have to see things through to the end. Transparency and accountability are key concepts in today’s policing.”
As our police chief reiterates at every opportunity
, he wanted to add, but he hoped she was smart enough to add them herself.