Raw Bone (6 page)

He looked up to see three cruisers bouncing over the grass, followed by four ambulances. From the east, a haz-mat truck tore through an opening in the trees and slid to a halt on the wet grass, thirty feet from the wagon.

“Dooey, remember when he was blinking—remember that?—and those groans?”

“Yeah.”

“He was trying to warn us.” Calleja’s mouth was quivering, either from shock or grief. “If I’d cut an opening for his mouth first … That’s why he was crying, Dooey. He knew it was gonna blow.”

It was 8:12 a.m. when the duty sergeant rang Homicide. Vertesi took the call. Aziz swung around to read the look on his face, which was dark and getting darker. He held the phone away, covering the mouthpiece. “Explosion in Gage Park, one dead, several injured, our guys included.”

She looked at MacNeice, who had been busy packing a briefcase with the warrant and a portable recorder for the Block and Tackle Bar.

Vertesi put the phone down. “This is weird. We’ve got a guy on a kid’s woody wagon, all wrapped up in duct tape. The firefighters were cutting him out of it when they triggered a grenade.” The surviving casualties were either at St. Joe’s or Dundurn General—no word on their status. Vertesi added that there was an old homeless guy who saw the whole thing from under the tree where he was bunking. “He’s unhurt and on his way here for an interview, ‘and breakfast,’ downstairs.”

MacNeice snapped the briefcase shut and looked down at the fine scratches on its worn surface. He recalled the moment Kate gave it to him. She thought it was what a newly minted detective needed. He was grateful but couldn’t imagine ever using it. Now, years later, it was a through line to the countless scenes of shattered lives. “Michael, get over to St. Joe’s—they’ll have the walking wounded there. Interview anyone who’s conscious. After that, start doing door-to-doors along Gage Avenue to see if anyone saw something suspicious before or after the blast. Fiza, find out what you can from the old man. I’ll go down to Gage Park before I hit the Block
and Tackle.”

Vertesi grabbed his coat, slapped the top of his cubicle divider and ran off toward the stairs.

“I’m off too,” Aziz said. Notepad in hand, she turned and was gone.

Ryan had swung around on his chair to watch them leave. As if sensing panic, the lights on several of his machines were blinking blue and green behind him. He turned to MacNeice, who gave him a grim smile and said the first thing he could think of: “Protect the groove, son. It’s going to get weird.” He threw his coat over his shoulder and disappeared down the corridor, clutching the scarred briefcase.

Yellow police tape blocked curious citizens from entering the park from Main or Gage Avenue, from the south end past the band shell and anywhere along the eastern boundary. A second ribbon of tape meandered everywhere the shower of wagon, flesh, gut and bone had flown. A dozen Tyvek suits were walking slowly about with large, opaque Ziploc bags, placing little plastic numbers on the grass—a seemingly endless supply of numbers—wherever they found evidence. Pieces of the wagon and fragments of the grenade were numbered and bagged separately from the body matter. Each bag was marked with its corresponding location number in a red or black Sharpie. Red: bio-matter; black: everything else. The red-numbered bags were stacked at the edge of the site, close to the black morgue van. This pile was the size of a toddler and distinguished by the soft sagging of the forms. The stack of black-numbered bags was larger and angular, as if what was inside had resisted.

At the centre of all this activity was a blackened and circular four-foot hollow that resembled the pit from a weekend-long pig roast. Angry streaks of torn grass and soil splayed outward in a starburst for three more yards or so. Anyone who had stayed standing would have been ripped apart by shrapnel. Clearly, the trick wasn’t running; it was knowing when to hit the ground. Instinct said to try and outdistance the blast. By the abandoned wads of bloodied gauze, MacNeice could see how far each man had run before he’d been knocked down.

MacNeice walked over to where the old man had been sleeping, under a tree on the east side of the clearing. Three layers of flattened corrugated box remained, alongside two Styrofoam food containers—presumably empty. MacNeice squatted down and looked across to the black starburst. “Ringside seat.”

To his left, he could just see the intersection of two paths. The wagon-puller had a choice there, to go right or left, but instead, he’d pulled the wagon onto the grass. Wheel lines were still visible where his heavy load had dug into the ground. Salty Conner said the man had dropped the wagon’s handle and walked off toward Gage. But did he keep walking or take cover somewhere to watch the show?

MacNeice went over to the path. It curved away north before joining another spoke that led to the delta of King and Main Streets. But that’s where the man had come from, not where he was going, and there were seven uniforms, heads down, walking slowly toward that corner. MacNeice turned and went the other way. He looked back to the corrugated pad and took several steps to ensure he was in line with the detonation site. To the north, he could see that the wagon-puller had positioned his load on an axis with the east-west path and the promenade that led north to Main Street. The guy likes geometry, MacNeice thought, and walked through the trees on the west side, pausing at another spoke.

He looked in both directions:
think like him
. He turned to see if the epicentre of the explosion was still visible—it was, but barely. Slowly, he walked north, away from the band shell. When he found a clear sightline to the blast site, he realized that if the bomber had stood here he would be in plain sight. He turned and walked south again.

Along the northern edge of the band shell, he found a place where he could see the wagon pit while he remained hidden. Stepping away from the wall, he did a slow pirouette, looking for any sign of roughed-up ground or cigarette butts or even gum wrappers. If his theory was correct, the killer would have been standing there for a long time before the explosion, with no control over when the grenade was triggered. The dirt behind him looked freshly disturbed, and MacNeice noticed something on the back of the band shell wall. He leaned closer, took out his cellphone and framed the image: a happy face with the words “Justice, Finally” written above it.

It could have been there for months, since the last summer music festival. But still, move one foot in either direction and the blackened starburst would disappear. MacNeice jogged back along the path. To the first Tyvek he came across, he said, “Where’s your boss? Point him out to me.”

Within minutes there was a two-man forensics team at the north end of the band shell, one inspecting the roughed-up dirt, the other dusting the graffiti and the back of the descending shell in the unlikely event that the perp wasn’t wearing gloves. MacNeice waited off to the side, where he was certain the man wouldn’t have stood.

“Interesting,” he heard the one dusting the wall say to his partner.

“What have you found?” MacNeice called.

“The guy who wrote this was wearing gloves, but not leather or wool.”

MacNeice stepped closer as the man showed him one of the handprints.

“What am I looking at?”

“I’d say the same synthetic gloves I’m wearing. The wagon handle was too charred to get anything, but we might luck out with a piece of wood from the sides, or even some of the duct tape. If we find the same print, you haven’t got the man, but you’ll be sure he was here.”

“So this is fresh.”

“Yes. Going by the width of the palm print, the guy’s got big hands. Look here.”

MacNeice leaned to get a view of the wall.

“Here’s the heel of his right palm—see the width?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

The tech held his own palm close to the print and said, “I’m six-one, with fairly big hands, but look at this—he’s got an inch on me.”

The man on his knees said, “There’s a couple of your shoe prints, detective, and the rest of the ground is pretty messed up, like he was shuffling back and forth from the cold or something. Except here—see?”

“What is it?”

“Size twelve, I think … a fresh print.”

MacNeice thanked them and walked back out to the path heading south to the Gage entrance to the park. He studied the gravel and dirt pad near a phone box. There was nothing that he could see and the rest of the area was paved. Stepping back onto the path, he considered the possibility that the wagon-puller had headed north after the explosion, but that way he might have walked right into a cop.

The residents bordering the park would soon be heading off to work or errands. MacNeice ran back to the uniformed squad leader and told him that it was important to have officers immediately knocking on doors from Main to Lawrence on the west side of the park and to pay particular attention to the apartment building and houses facing the park’s exit at the Cumerland Street intersection. Did anyone see someone exiting the park right after the grenade went off—either a person running away from the explosion, or a big man walking casually away as if nothing at all had happened?

“DI Michael Vertesi from Homicide will be here soon. Have your team coordinate with him.”

As MacNeice got back into his car, the skies opened and rain pounded the roof. It was like being inside a snare drum and at first he just sat and listened. The rain would make a mess of the scene and the footprints by the band shell would soon be splattered and gone.

When it let up a little, MacNeice drove slowly up Gage to Lawrence and pulled off the road next to the railway tracks to survey potential escape routes. Everything seemed possible here—east, west or north—if he had a vehicle. He could have climbed the mountain and made his way along the tracks, using the trees for cover. But Cumerland, adjacent to the park entrance, appeared to be the quickest and easiest way out.

As he was turning to head back down to King Street, a deafening thunderclap took MacNeice’s breath away and, a moment later, a lightning bolt flashed off to the right, so close that it lit the interior of the car. On the far side of the tracks, a tree exploded and fell, igniting a small fire in the shattered trunk that, for a few minutes, appeared to ignore the rain. Biblical, truly biblical.

He put in a call to the dispatcher to have either the fire department or the railway check
the downed tree and eased the Chevy northbound on Gage, heading toward the Block and Tackle Bar. Passing the band shell and crime scene, he could see white tents over several sites with forensics personnel huddling inside.

Approaching the bar, MacNeice hesitated, then drove north to the waterfront. He parked at Macassa Bay and waited for the rain to run out. When it finally did, he locked the Chevy and walked toward the shore trail. The wind was coming in hard off the bay. It was colder than the day before and the rain that had fallen was already freezing, making it slippery underfoot.

MacNeice fastened his coat buttons and coaxed the scarf higher on his neck. The trail led to a lump of land the city had reclaimed as a waterside park. After it was revealed the infill was toxic and not fit for residential development, the developer avoided a lawsuit by gifting it to the city. From Burlington Heights, it looked like a coyote’s head, jaw wide open, howling to the wind. Deserted in winter, the surrounding slips for powerboats and sail were all empty.

A young couple passed him, bundled against the weather. They nodded cheerily in his direction as their tan and white terrier raced along clutching a miniature orange Frisbee in its teeth. MacNeice walked to the end of the coyote’s nose, which jutted deep into Dundurn Bay. He squinted against the driving wind, looking out to the spit of land Rivera’s police boat had roared around after the body was found. It was a short boat ride away, maybe five minutes, give or take, depending on the weather.

Turning around, MacNeice faced the intersection that led directly to the Block and Tackle Bar.

During the day, Macassa would be the last place you’d bring a dead body for a boat ride, even in December. The pleasure craft that anchored here in the summer were mostly gleaming white fibreglass. Their owners wouldn’t risk going deep into Cootes Paradise, because getting that brown gunk off a white hull would be hard work. And the farther you went into Cootes, the more unpredictable, shallow and weed-infested it became—especially late in the year. Nobody would want to feel the humiliation of being towed out of trouble.

An aluminum boat could do it, though who’d moor a tin boat in a marina of glimmering fibreglass?

MacNeice walked somewhat stiffly over to the coyote’s lower mandible, where there was a narrow inlet used for launching boats. Beyond and above it to the west were parked or decommissioned freight cars sitting on the cold, rusty ribs beyond the active lines that connected to Toronto. Sitting stately and proud on top of it all, on what had been a pristine bay-view lot, was Dundurn Castle.

MacNeice recalled from some long-ago class that it was the castle’s owner, Sir Allan MacNab—war hero, rebellion quasher, politician and railway magnate—who promoted and presumably profited from the railway’s development, even though the rail lines put an end to his unimpeded view and severed the family’s private access to the bay and the lake beyond. Sir Allan didn’t care. He’d simply go up on the roof with his bagpipes to drown out the unearthly clamour of heavy metal below. The fog of steam and coal-black smoke hadn’t bothered him either. He was a dedicated champion of progress and captain of industry.

Walking down to the water’s edge, MacNeice startled six Canada geese that had taken shelter in the inlet. Flapping frantically, they paddled the water until they were airborne. Banking east, they gained speed and altitude, their honking fading and finally lost in the wind.

“The perfect place to launch,” MacNeice said out loud.

Was she alive when they left, pushing off for a romantic tour of the Burlington shore? A romantic tour in late November or December? Stranger things have happened. She most certainly would have been wearing several layers of warm clothes. MacNeice’s joints ached as he climbed the bank and walked on the frozen-stiff grass back toward his car.