Stray Bullets (4 page)

Downstairs on the kitchen counter, the message button on the phone said six calls had come in overnight. She’d told her best friend, Zelda, who usually phoned about five times a day, not to call on pain of death. It must be a client.

“Not my problem,” she said, filling the kettle with hot water from the tap. Zelda always bugged her to use cold water to make coffee, but who had the time? “I’m off duty.”

Late last night when she’d left the office, DiPaulo had made her swear she wouldn’t answer the phone or check her voice mail. It felt great to watch that light blink, on and off, on and off, and ignore it. As a backup, they’d set up an emergency system. If DiPaulo really needed to get hold of her, he’d call her cell. It had a special ring tone—the Mexican hat dance—just for him.

“Da da, da da, la da da, la da da. Da da da, la da da, la da da,” she sang to herself as she danced around the kitchen and yanked open the fridge. The kettle began to churn, adding a backbeat to her singing.

“Mex … i … co, here I come.” She pranced to the front door. There was just a hint of light in the dark morning sky. The first snow of the season had blown in last night, leaving a white layer on everything except the newspaper perched on the front steps of her semidetached house. It was wrapped in a blue plastic bag. She slid it under her arm, waltzed back to the kitchen, and tossed a handful of coffee beans into the grinder.

“Grrrr,” she sang along with the chopping sound, her mind drifting to thoughts of Karl. Karl hugging and kissing her at the airport. Karl in a bathing suit. Afternoon siestas with Karl. “I love you, Nancy,” Karl had said their last night together. Karl, Karl, Karl. “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm …”

She scooped the coffee grounds into the French press pot, poured in the boiled water, and burst out laughing. A whole week of sun, sand, and sex. Get out of Toronto in November, the darkest damn month.

The instruction booklet said you were supposed to let the coffee sit for five minutes, but fuck it. She palmed the plunger down, poured out a nice hot cup, and sat at her narrow kitchen table. She pulled the paper out of the bag and was about to take her first sip when the phone on the counter rang.

“No, no, no.” She wagged her finger at it, like an angry grandma in some fairy tale. “I’m out of here.”

Her cell rang, playing the Mexican hat dance.

“Shit.” She stared at the newspaper as she answered her partner’s call. “Ted?”

“Did you talk to him?” DiPaulo didn’t even say hello. Not his usual polite style.

The front page was dominated by a mug shot of a young man with
a screaming headline on top:
ARMED AND
D
ANGEROUS
—F
ULL
P
OLICE
M
ANHUNT FOR
S
USPECT IN
T
IM
H
ORTONS
B
OY
K
ILLING
. Staring back at her was the face of Larkin St. Clair, her client for the last ten years, since he was twelve years old, when he’d started his life of crime by stealing from
Toronto Sun
newspaper boxes.

“No, Ted, I …” Parish was reading frantically now. “Wait.”

She lunged across the kitchen for the home phone.

“Nancy Parish,” she said, breathless, her lawyer’s way of answering the phone clicking in automatically.

“Where the fuck you been?”

It was St. Clair. He never introduced himself. No need. She often joked that she’d known him longer than any other man in her life, including her ex-husband.

“I just saw the paper.” She was carrying on the unspoken code—never use a client’s name on the phone when he’s on the run.

“Fuck, man, I’ve been calling and calling—”

“I didn’t know it was you.” She started to pace.

“This time, I’ll turn myself in.” He sounded shaky.

“Good.”

“Meet me where we were going to have that beer,” he said. “Just you.”

That beer. For years, as he had careened from halfway houses to juvenile jails to provincial institutions to federal penitentiaries, they’d had an ongoing mythical conversation. How one summer night the two of them would go to a restaurant on the Danforth, around the corner from her house, sit on the outdoor patio, St. Clair no longer in jail, finally off parole so he didn’t have to piss into a cup twice a week.

Of course it never happened. But they had the restaurant all picked out. Information that no one else would know.

“I’m leaving on holiday in half an hour,” she said. Out the back window a swirl of fresh snow was coming down against the dull gray sky. “My partner Ted DiPaulo’s—”

“No way, Nancy. Where you going?”

“Mexico.”

“Mexico? You don’t get it, man. I’m front-page news.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Nancy. Listen. This isn’t what it sounds like. I need you.”

“The cab’s going to be here soon.” She eyed the packed bag in the front hall that she’d carried downstairs last night.

“Then I’m gone,” he said. “No way I’m going into the cops with anyone else.”

“I haven’t had a holiday in—”

“Fuck it.”

“But Ted’s …” She looked back at the newspaper. Beside the mug shot of St. Clair was a color photo of a young couple with a beautiful dark-haired boy.

“I’ll disappear, man.”

“He’s a former Crown Attorney and—”

“They won’t find me for a hundred fuckin’ years.”

Her eyes went to the father in the photo, a fat man with jowly cheeks. His eyes were soft and sparkling.

“Nancy, what’s going on?” she heard a distant voice say. Who was talking to her? Then she realized Ted DiPaulo was screaming at her through the cell phone in her other hand. She looked over at her cup of coffee, growing cold.

“How long do you need?” she asked St. Clair.

“Half an hour,” he said.

“Make it forty-five minutes,” she said. St. Clair had never been on time for anything in his life. “I’ll drive by our place real slow and pop open the back door behind me. You jump in and keep your goddamn head down.”

“I love you, Nancy,” St. Clair said before he hung up.

She looked at the home phone in her hand. Then again at the eyes of the little boy’s father.

“I love you, Nancy,” she said to herself, not quite sure whether or not she’d spoken out loud.

Ari Greene should have been tired. It was a quarter to seven and he’d been up all night interviewing witnesses in the big police mobile command unit truck stationed down the block from the Tim Hortons. Twenty-two patrons and passersby had been there when the shots rang out. He’d spoken to them one after another without a break because he wanted to get their recollections down on tape as fast as possible. While their memories were fresh.

But fatigue was the farthest thing from his mind. The case was a giant jigsaw puzzle and he was thinking overtime trying to stitch it together. Most of the witnesses had seen bits of what happened or heard snippets of conversation, and only a handful would be useful at trial. Not one of them had witnessed the actual shooting.

Still, they were consistent enough on key points that a story emerged. At about five o’clock two young men, one short with red hair, the other tall with very long hair, were at a table inside the door of the Tim Hortons. A large car—one witness, a South African businessman who’d been standing across the street, said it was an old Cadillac—pulled into the far corner of the lot. The two men went outside. A woman ran from the opposite corner of the coffee shop across the lot to meet the driver, who had gotten out of his car, and seconds later there were gunshots. Just how many shots wasn’t clear. Estimates ranged from as few as three to as many as nine. Greene wasn’t surprised by these inconsistencies, which were typical with civilian witnesses. One of the bullets hit a little boy who was walking into the shop with his father. No one saw where the short red-haired guy went, but many saw the tall one with the long hair sprint across the parking lot and run out onto Elm Street.

As Greene’s night wore on things had become even clearer. Just after ten, Detective Officer Ho walked into the command unit with the surveillance footage from the doughnut shop. The inside camera caught the two young men seated at a table near the door, drinking coffee. The camera angle was from on top, making it impossible to identify them. The one with the long hair all the way down to his waist
was chatting to some girls at the next table. At 5:00:34, according to the counter in the corner of the video, the shorter one tapped his partner on the arm and pointed out the front window toward the parking lot. The two exited at 5:00:58. The first 911 call reporting gunshots came in at 5:03:01, and seconds later, at 5:03:49, the tall guy could be seen rushing into the parking lot. He looked over to the spot where the child had fallen, stuffed something into the front of his pants—it wasn’t clear enough to identify as a gun—and ran out onto Elm Street. Just before he took off, he turned and looked right into the camera, which captured his face perfectly.

“Stop it right there,” Greene said to Ho, who was playing the video on his laptop. “I recognize that face. Looks like a younger version of Austin St. Clair, who I’ve arrested six times. He’s still in jail on a jury-tampering charge.

“Excellent guess. It’s his son.” Ho chuckled for the first time all night. He pointed to the screen. “These two young geniuses left their coffee cups on the table. I rushed them up to the lab and the overnight operators lifted two sets of prints.”

“You get a match?”

Ho pulled some police reports from his bag. “We got a definitive for Larkin St. Clair, your old pal Austin’s only son. Take a look at his latest mug shot.”

It was the same guy. “And the short one?” Greene asked.

“Got a partial that’s probably Dewey Booth. Wouldn’t stand up in court but take a look at their file. These two jerks have a long history of committing crimes together. Last time they robbed a pharmacy late at night. Booth punched a female pharmacist in the face when she hesitated handing over the money. Broke her jaw. He got three years. St. Clair was standing six outside and he only got a year plus probation. Booth just got out of jail four days ago and the next day St. Clair’s probation officer reported him as AWOL. He missed his weekly appointment.”

Greene called headquarters. The front desk back at Homicide was going crazy fielding calls from the media, who wanted a news update for their morning editions. He dictated a press release with Larkin St. Clair’s most recent police photo on it, not the image from the video. He didn’t want to reveal that St. Clair was captured on tape. That would lead to questions about whether the police also had pictures of his partner. And right now, he wanted to keep Dewey Booth’s name under the radar.

Just after seven in the morning, minutes after he’d finished interviewing his last witness, a call came in on his cell.

“Detective Greene?”

“Yes.”

“This is PC Darvesh. I’m one of the officers guarding the Wilkinson family at the hospital.”

Greene closed his eyes. “Yes.”

“The child. Kyle. He died.”

Breathe, Greene told himself, breathe. He wasn’t quite sure how long it took him to say, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The icy walk up the snow-covered street only took a minute or two and when the elevator opened on the ninth floor of the hospital, the sun, which was climbing over the downtown skyline, hit him square in the eyes. He squinted involuntarily.

“Sir, I’m afraid only authorized personnel are allowed on the floor this morning,” a young female police officer said, stepping in front of him. She had dark hair, blunt-cut tight to her head. Her face was stern, her eyes tired.

Greene had his badge in his hand, and he flashed it at her.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry, detective.”

“Don’t be sorry, that’s good work.” He extended his arm to shake hands. “Ari Greene.”

“PC Albright,” she said. Her fingers were tense.

“Where’s the father?” he asked.

“Room 908. He just told his wife.”

“I heard she’s pregnant,” he said.

“Due in about two weeks. Started bleeding a few days ago. Has had two miscarriages since their first son was born.” She spoke in a clipped staccato, like she was reading from a notebook.

“Who’s your partner?”

“PC Darvesh. He’s outside the room.”

“Good,” he said. “The press are all over the lobby downstairs. I’ve got officers covering every elevator and the stairwell. Still they’ll try to sneak up here. No matter what, don’t let them anywhere near them.”

“I won’t.”

He took a few steps down the hall, then turned back. “Remember, you’re not just protecting this family,” he told Albright. “Being here, they see people care.”

Her tight lips turned up into a wan smile. “Thanks, detective.”

The door to room 908 was open. Another young officer, this one a male Sikh wearing a blue turban with a Toronto police insignia squarely in the center, was standing guard, his back to the wall. He glanced at Greene’s badge and nodded. From inside the room Greene heard crying, great sobs of shock and sorrow.

The officer gave Greene a firm handshake. “PC Darvesh.” He kept his voice low.

“Ari Greene.” He stood beside Darvesh.

An old clock hung crookedly on the opposite wall. It was 7:18.

“How long you been here?” Greene was almost whispering.

“Since midnight.”

“Tough assignment,” Greene said.

“Yes.” Darvesh’s eyes were straight forward.

Greene folded his arms and concentrated on the sweep of the second hand. He was impressed with PC Darvesh. The man’s stillness. Patience. Learning how to wait things out was the toughest thing to teach young cops. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a business card.

“Don’t go home when you get off shift,” he said. “Call me. I might have an assignment for you.”

Darvesh took the card and didn’t say a word. Greene liked his quiet confidence.

Footsteps approached from inside room 908.

“You must be Detective Greene,” a large, rotund man said. He reached out his hand.

Greene shook it. “Hello, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Thanks for watching out for my wife.” Wilkinson’s eyes were puffy.