Raw Bone (13 page)

MacNeice looked over at Aziz. “The sarge says, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ The Fox’s wife laughed, then whispered to him, ‘Maybe you will be. But if you are, you’re sure to see him again.’ ”

Aziz laughed. She took one last look at the chit and handed it back to him.

“Pass me the photocopy of the register pages.”

She took them out of the manila envelope and he laid them out on the bed’s wooden slats. They compared the letters on the chit to the night clerk’s entries; there was a clear match in style, complete with a stroke through the seven.

“Fisherman, seaman, carpenter, bricklayer, night clerk and bookie,” MacNeice said, sliding the chit into the envelope with the pages.

“So it appears … But why would he leave it here?”

They ran through the rain to the car. Once they’d pulled away from the bar, MacNeice called Ryan and asked him to find Anniken Kallevik’s travelling companion, the tall Norwegian. “I need to know if he made it to Whistler.”

“You think Duguald Langan killed them both?” Aziz asked after he hung up.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think Duguald just wandered off.”

Back at Division, Aziz photographed both sides of the chit, slid it into a Ziploc evidence bag and took it down to Forensics.

“When you’re ready, sir, I’ve sourced the missing persons file on Jennifer Grant,” Ryan said.

“Thanks … Right after you find my Norwegian.”

MacNeice taped a copy of the chit and wrote “bookie” under Duguald Langan’s name, then drew a dotted line to Anniken Kallevik’s picture.

Ryan had soon found two Norwegian males, both twenty-three years old, working in or near Whistler, one in a bar at the Whistler Inn and the other with the ski patrol at Blackcomb. Only the bartender, Markus Christophe, was tall and blond, but since he worked nights, he was still in bed. Ryan was on hold with the inn. “He’ll be up by six p.m. our time. Do you want me to ask them to wake him up, sir?”

“No. Just get the best number to reach him. And find out when he was hired.”

After a minute or so more on the phone, Ryan put a hand over the receiver. “He arrived on November 15th and started at the bar the next night.”

Though MacNeice’s gut was telling him otherwise, this news meant there might not be anyone at the bottom of Cootes after all.

He heard Vertesi and Williams coming before they were halfway up the stairs, bantering about the rain. Williams said, “It’s like the tropics out there, without the heat, the palm trees and the bikinis.”

“So what, you’re not from the tropics?”

“Stallion, my ancestors have been living in Canada since yours were hanging out in caves over in Sicily.”

“Calabria—the mountains of
Calabria
.” Vertesi was the first to notice that MacNeice was there. “Hey, boss,” he said, shaking the water off his coat.

“To some, Nicholson was a saint. Nobody had anything negative to say about him,” Williams offered, shedding his equally drenched coat.

Vertesi pushed the wet hair off his forehead and said, “Yeah, but even the ones that thought he was a mensch admitted they didn’t know him all that well.”

“Even though he’d been teaching there a long time.” Williams shrugged as he said it, like either it was a sad comment on the man or that Nicholson’s colleagues weren’t being honest.

Vertesi tapped David Nicholson’s name on the whiteboard. “Somebody really didn’t like the guy. That school’s in shock, so it’s hard to tell for sure what they think. All of them asked about Dylan.”

“Whatever questions we might have about his dad, that kid is a hero at Mercy,” Williams offered.

Vertesi opened his notebook. “Elana Roane was the only teacher to mention Nicholson’s wife leaving him. She said …” He looked for the precise quote. “ ‘I thought his wife was lovely and she appeared to adore Dylan, who was in Mercy’s junior kindergarten.’ Roane was really surprised when she bolted.”

“Tell him what she said then,” Williams nudged.

Vertesi returned to his notes. “David was a bit darker back then. She said
moody
would best describe him.”

Referring to his own notes, Williams added, “ ‘He seemed much sunnier afterwards, so I just thought it was a bad marriage. At Mercy, Dylan and his father were inseparable.’ ”

“Understandable, with the mother deserting them,” Aziz said as she returned.

MacNeice’s head was resting on his hands. He seemed to be studying the fake grain of his desk. “Ryan, let’s hear what you’ve got on Jennifer Grant.”

“Quite a bit, sir.” Ryan spun his chair around and began tapping away on the keyboard. MacNeice felt some comfort in the sound. In seconds, the photocopier was printing out the missing persons report.

MacNeice turned to Aziz. “Fiza, find out if Dylan is still at home.” She nodded and turned to her phone.

“Boss, should we start checking old report cards?” Vertesi asked.

“No. There’s no way he was killed by a high school student.”

Aziz put the phone back in its cradle. “Nobody answered at Dylan’s, Mac. I’ll try again in a few minutes.”

Ryan handed MacNeice the report, and MacNeice quickly scanned it. He shook his head. “Nicholson and Jennifer Grant’s family filed MPRs on the same day but with different divisions.
One week later, Jennifer called her parents from Silver Lake in Los Angeles. Said she just needed a break and was staying with a girlfriend who’d moved there from Dundurn. The grandparents said she seemed to be happy. Jennifer apologized for not telling them and admitted that she hadn’t told David either.” He looked up to see the raised eyebrows of his team. “Jennifer promised to stay in touch by cellphone. Her parents told Nicholson, along with her promise that she would be returning to the city in a few weeks. With that, the case was closed until two months later.” MacNeice turned the page. “Her parents called the police again because they hadn’t heard from Jennifer, she wasn’t answering emails and her cellphone message box was full. They’d called the girlfriend she’d been staying with, and the girlfriend said that Jennifer had left two weeks earlier to go up the coast before heading home.” He flipped through the pages and back again. “The rest is about what the cops did—standard stuff, engaged the LAPD, sent her photograph and description to law enforcement agencies across the continent. LAPD searched the girlfriend’s condo and found a bag of marijuana she claimed was Jennifer’s. They speculated that Jennifer might have disappeared into the drug culture.”

“Long way to go for a few joints,” Vertesi said.

Williams added, “And a big leap from finding a bag of weed that might have actually been her friend’s to opium dens in East LA.”

“I suspect it was a convenient assumption at the time,” MacNeice said, and returned to the notes. He turned the page to the Dundurn Police Department’s confidential summary. “After interviewing her husband, parents and brother, DPD concluded that Jennifer Grant was a ‘wild child’ tired of parenting and disinterested in teaching—their conclusion based primarily on the fact that she didn’t inform her husband or the school that she was leaving. Though they never closed the case, it’s safe to say it’s cold.”

“Frozen.” Williams shook his head in disgust.

Referring to a note on his desk, Ryan said, “It wasn’t hard to find her parents. They own Grant Greengrocers out in Dundas. They still own the shop but it’s mostly run now by her brother, who was also a teacher before he took early retirement.” Ryan handed the address to Vertesi.

“It’s strange, now that Nicholson has been identified as the bombing victim by the media, that the grandparents haven’t called Dylan,” MacNeice said.

Aziz’s cellphone rang. She listened, then put it on hold and turned to MacNeice. “You spoke too soon, Mac. They’re at the house. The grandparents. I’ve got Dylan on the phone. Children’s Services brought them in because Dylan’s aunt refused to take responsibility for him.” She clicked back onto the line and then hung up, after promising Dylan that she’d tell MacNeice what was going on.

“It was a reasonable assumption that his grandparents are the next best option before foster care,” MacNeice said.

“The only trouble with that is that Dylan hasn’t seen them or his uncle Robert in years because his father had severed contact with them. When Dylan asked his dad why, he was told his uncle blamed Nicholson for Jennifer’s disappearance and her parents agreed with him.”

MacNeice stared at the photo of David Nicholson in the Hawaiian shirt. “The poor kid. The way this is going, he will end up in foster care.”

The main line rang and Ryan picked up. “Sir, there’s someone asking for you, but he won’t give his name.”

MacNeice nodded, and answered. “MacNeice.”

A man said, “There’s a café bar on Locke near Pine—you know the place?”

“Yes.”

“Be there in a half-hour.”

“What’s your name and how will I know you?”

“Don’t worry about that. I know you. And if you’re as good as they say, you’ll be able to figure it out. I knew David Nicholson well enough to know there’s a different story than the one you’re probably hearing.”

“And what might that be?”

The caller laughed or coughed, his voice crackling through nicotine or alcohol-clogged airways. “Come on, detective, that’s something we’ll discuss in person.”

Once MacNeice explained, both Vertesi and Williams offered to back him up.

“No reason why three of us need to check this out. I’ll be back soon.”

He parked across the street from the bar, then tried to peer through the rain into its interior, but it was too dark.

Standing on the threshold, he shook the rain off his coat. The bar was a long, narrow and immediately familiar space, shaped like a shoebox. There were elevated booths on the right and a long counter on the left. It was just after four, and locals out for an early evening or a late lunch occupied all but one of the booths. At the bar three men were talking to the bartender, and two others were pretending not to listen. The bartender was working the ornate handle of an on-tap lager into a pint. After she glanced at him, she whispered something that made two of the men
look his way and nod. In the last booth a man sat alone with his back to the door. He didn’t look around. MacNeice made his way to him.

“See, that wasn’t too difficult. I’ve ordered you a lager.”

The man was in his mid-forties, his face lined not from age but from working outside in all kinds of weather. An ancient waxed Barbour raincoat leaned stiffly against the wall of the booth.

The bartender brought the lager over and placed it in front of him. “Cheers, detective,” she said, then walked away with an exaggerated wiggle.

“Out of interest, how did you know when to order the lager?”

“Easy. You had thirty minutes to get here. At twenty-six I asked her to pour another glass. Cheers.” He chinked his glass against MacNeice’s while it was still on the table.

Studying the pint for a moment, MacNeice at last smiled and lifted his glass. “Cheers.” He took a long draw before putting it down. “Name?”

“Graham McLeod. I’m a landscape architect and contractor. I was once Jennifer Grant’s fiancé.”

Watching MacNeice for a reaction—there was none—McLeod drank and wiped the foam from his lip with his thumb. “We broke up for all the wrong reasons and a few of the right ones.” He put his large hands flat on the table and took a deep breath. “We stayed friends after, but when Jenny started dating Nicholson, that ended too.”

“Why was that?”

“The obvious. Nicholson was uncomfortable with her maintaining a relationship with a former lover, let alone a fiancé. He was jealous for years, and even after they were married, he was convinced that she was seeing me on the sly. She wasn’t.”

“Until?”

“What do you mean?” McLeod sat back in his seat.

“We’re not here now because Nicholson was jealous for no reason. When did you reconnect?”

McLeod tilted his head, studying the detective. “A year before she disappeared, she called me. She said he’d struck her and after she ran into the bathroom and locked the door, he kicked it in. He’d punched her so hard in the stomach that she threw up. If it hadn’t been for her vomiting, she thought he would have beaten her senseless.” He spoke slowly, as if he was pulling a file from somewhere back in his head, but he wasn’t finished.

MacNeice took out his notebook and pen. McLeod finished his lager and waited for him to look up again.

“She called in sick at the school. I told her to meet me here.” He wiped his mouth and looked around the bar. There were tears in his eyes that he wanted to hide from MacNeice. In a moment, another pint arrived. McLeod took a first sip, then said, “She had a welt on her cheek, and when she lifted up her sweater, there was a deep bruise on her stomach.”

“Did she report the beating?” MacNeice asked, making his notes.

“No. She was too embarrassed or ashamed. She didn’t want it getting out that Nicholson was abusive. I asked if she wanted me to talk to him, but Jenn didn’t want that, in part because she was worried about what Nicholson might do to me, and what he’d do to her afterwards. She told me that this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Worse, if I’d spoken to Dave, he’d have been convinced she’d been seeing me all along.”

MacNeice was nursing his lager, considering whether McLeod could be responsible for Nicholson’s death.

“I insisted we take photographs of the bruises. I went out to the truck and got the camera I’d been using out at the botanical gardens. I took her into the washroom.” He nodded to the narrow hallway beyond the bar.

“What did you do with the photographs?”

“Nothing. I was going to show them to the police after Jennifer disappeared, but then she called me from Los Angeles. She sounded happy. In a few weeks, she said, she’d like me to come out and join her.”

“And Dylan?”

“Dylan was four. Nicholson made it sound like the kid was deserted. No way. She loved that boy.”

But McLeod couldn’t explain why she hadn’t come back for her son. The woman she was staying with had come home one day and found a short note. McLeod recited it: “On my way back, to where I once belonged. Thank you sooo much for taking care of me. Love, Jenn.”