The Taken (2 page)

“It’s probably the same as last Thursday’s. Not to mention Monday’s. But leave it.”

“You’re falling behind on your papers. You don’t want your news getting stale, do you?” Hazel laughed at the thought of events passing so quickly in Westmuir that you’d have to make an effort to keep up. “At least it’ll pass the time without your having to resort to staring at pictures of nearly naked girls eating hamburgers.” Apart from the biweekly visits from
Detective Constable James Wingate, the
Record
was her only window on the world she lived in. The paper that had been a thorn in her side for all of the previous fall was now necessary to her sanity. She held her hand out for it.

“What are you going to do now?” Hazel asked.

“I told Andrew I’d do the crossword with him.”

“I should have seen Andrew’s facility with those things as a sign.”

“Of what?”

“That he knew how to disguise himself.”

Emily Micallef patted her daughter’s hand. “If he didn’t, he’d be the only man on earth who lacked the talent.” She put Hazel’s fork and napkin in the bowl and moved the bowl into the middle of the tray. When she got to the door that led to the upstairs hall, Hazel called to her.

“Mum?”

“What is it?”

“Ask him to come see me. Please?”

“Read the paper,” Emily said. “They’ve already started the summer short story.
The Record
’s gift to us all for putting on our best May-long-weekend faces.”

Hazel glanced at the headline – “Welcome Cottagers!” – and immediately put the paper down.

Detective Constable James Wingate did not like being in charge of anything. His whole life, he’d been a brilliant follower of instructions: he’d been born to carry out the orders of others. He’d sometimes wondered if this made him some kind of perfect soldier, if, in another time and place, he’d have been the tool of a lesser regime. He knew he had it in him to cross the line; he’d been inspired at times by anger. But a righteous anger, he told himself, usually carried out a just vengeance.

Following orders had landed him in temporary charge of the Port Dundas OPS detachment, much to the mostly silent discomfort of many men and women his senior. He’d been the new guy when he arrived from Toronto only six months earlier and his nature had permitted him to navigate the many twists of fitting in to a new place. But with her deputy, Ray Greene, gone, he was the one OPS Central had turned to to hold the fort while DI Micallef got back on her feet.

He played messenger as best he could, but he knew even his biweekly visits to the house on Chamber Street did not disguise the fact that he was actually in charge. He came back bearing her instructions, but the other officers knew he had her blessing in most things to do as he saw fit. He wrote out the weekly schedule, heard out differences of opinion, assigned the beats, and approved time off. The only thing he didn’t do was sit in Hazel’s office. His co-workers accepted his strange ascent only because failing to do so would add to their CO’s suffering. But Wingate could feel their resentment simmering.

Luckily, the late winter and early spring had been quiet in Port Dundas. Life had returned to the normal Hazel had described to him when he first arrived. The weekly B & E, the biweekly domestic, the monthly car theft. It was so regular here that the older cops joked they should have sign-up sheets for perps to fill in
before
they committed the quota of smalltime offences they dealt with in the county. Once in a while something would crop up that would knock them out of their rituals, and the meeting room would fill for an hour while they discussed what to do. They’d get Hazel on conference call and try not to picture her bedbound as she listened and responded to the case. In early April, there’d been a rape in Silltoe, halfway to Humber Cottage on the 121. A sixteen-year-old girl had been thrown from a car, naked and unconscious. She’d had no memory of what had happened to her. They listened to Hazel’s silence from both sides of the table, her breathing audible in the little black console. “Jesus,” she finally said. “Are we sure she’s not protecting someone?”

“Who would she want to protect?” PC Ashton had said.

“The assholes who presumed she’d be found dead by the side of the road?”

“Do you have daughters, Adrian?”

“No.”

“Girls this age think whatever happens to them is their fault. In my day, it was unthinkable to report a rape. If you got into trouble with a guy, it was your own damn fault. Things haven’t changed as much as we like to think.”

Wingate leaned forward over the speakers. “I really think this girl doesn’t remember a thing.”

“Get one of her girlfriends into the room. Have her tell the victim that no one thinks what happened to her is her fault. Tell her the whole school is sick about it and everyone wants these monsters to pay. See what she says.”

The girl was a student at St. Pius X in Rowanville. They brought two of the most popular girls down to the hospital and they sat by the victim’s bed weeping and holding her hand. At the end of the visit, the girls left and one of them leaned over to PC Peter MacTier, who was waiting for them in the hallway, and gave him a name. They made the arrest that same afternoon.

Wingate, sitting in a chair in the Chamber Street basement, passed Hazel the file. “They want to go to trial,” he said.

Hazel sat opposite him, the small coffee table between them doing double duty as a desk. She was listing to one side, but he ignored it. He’d told her a number of times that she should stay in bed when he visited, but she wouldn’t have it. It was bad enough she had to greet him in a housecoat; she would not play invalid to the hilt. But he could see how difficult it was for her to sit in a chair.

“Idiots,” she said. “They want the whole thing on record?”

“It’s her story too. This one” – he reached across and pointed to a name in the file – “he’s got no way out and he knows it. He just wants to shame her. And his lawyer is telling him the girl’s amnesia is going to make her unreliable on the stand.”

“She gave a name.”

“They’re going to argue her friends suggested it to her. Although when we ran the kid through CPIC, he had two priors, one violent.”

Hazel sighed.

“You know she’s changed schools,” Wingate said. “She wouldn’t go back to St. Pius.”

“Is she getting the help she needs?”

“Our job ends with the collar, Skip. You know that. We gave her mother all the phone numbers.”

She closed the file. “Justice ‘done’ and another life ruined,” she said. “We give the mother a list of phone numbers and hope for the best, right?” He shrugged sadly. “It’s a wonder we don’t have more heartbroken mothers on the trigger end of revenge killings, James. Honestly. If someone had done this to one of my daughters and then basically walked, I don’t know what I’d do. But you’d have to take away my sidearm for a year, I can tell you.” There was no role for the law in prevention, she thought, no role in giving solace. They said the law was an ass, but those who enforced it knew it was blind, deaf, and mute as well.

She tossed the file onto the table. “Anything else?”

“Well, there’s one thing,” he said, and he fished in an inside pocket, removing an envelope that had been folded in half. “This came addressed to the station house, no stamp, just a drop-off. No one has any idea what it is.” He handed it to her,
and she unfolded it, noting that the address had been typed out on a label and glued to the envelope. It read “Hazel Micallef, Port Dundas OPS/Port Dundas, ON – PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” and there was no postal code. She tipped the contents of the envelope out into her hand: a small pile of dark photographs.

She spread the pictures out on the table in front of them. There were twelve of them. To call them
photographs
was generous, they were nearly black images on glossy photographic paper, but there was nothing identifiable in them. In some of them, differentiation between shades of black suggested shapes, but in none of them could a concrete image be made out.

“What do you think?”

“Maybe someone wants to file a complaint against a local photo lab?” she said.

“Forbes said he thought they were pretty menacing. Like someone had sent us pictures of people with their faces X’ed out.”

“Well, if he can find any faces in these pictures, then we’ll talk. But otherwise, I’ve got no idea what it is.”

“Okay.” Wingate swept the photos off the table and put them back into the envelope.

“There was no note or anything?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She shrugged. There were crackpots everywhere, even in Westmuir County. “How are things with you? People treating you right?”

“You know. They resent me with a smile.” He cast a look around the dim room. The bed was made, the pillows squared. “And you?”

“I’m in hell. I keep hoping you’ll show up with a saw and a change of clothes.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know. I saw Gary – Dr. Pass – yesterday. He seems to think I’m coming along.”

He shook his head. “We all hate knowing you’re trapped down here. I wish we could make up one of the cells for you and keep you safe from all this.”

“Anything that would get me back into work would be fine with me. I’m going crazy down here.” She saw him mask the look of pity that crossed his face. There was no way to reassure her that the situation didn’t look as strange as it did.

He got up and put his cap back on. “Is there anything you need? I don’t mind being in charge of contraband if it would help any.”

She fished her pills out of the terrycloth robe’s pocket and held them up to him. “I’m covered,” she said. “You want to go back to the bed?”

She shook her head. “Glynnis is coming home for lunch in an hour. She’ll get me.”

He didn’t know what to say. He returned the few files he had with him to his bag. “I’ll see you again on Monday,” he said.

“I’ll be counting the hours. Literally.”

“How is she?”

Wingate took the day’s mail out of Melanie Cartwright’s hand and shuffled through it slowly. There was nothing else like the envelope he had in his pocket. “She’s like a tiger in a cage. It’s awful.”

“You could always put her up in your apartment.”

“I’m three floors up,” he said. “And anyway, no thanks. This is strange enough as it is. Anything happen while I was gone?”

“You mean like a palace coup?”

“Sure, anything like that?”

“Not so far.” He handed her back the entire pile of mail. She was the one who had to deal with it anyway. “They
are
stockpiling arms in the cells, though. I’d watch my back if I were you.” He could only manage a half-smile.

“Is that everything?”

“That’s everything,” she said.

He went into the squad room, what they all called “the pen” here, a charming touch, he thought. For a small-town shop, the Port Dundas detachment always seemed busy to him. At Twenty-one Division in Toronto, on an afternoon like this, his old squad room would be buzzing with activity of a similar-seeming sort. Desk-phones ringing; cellphones playing snatches of music; people shouting over their desks for one thing or another. And the doors to the interview rooms busy, officers marching men and women (about equally at Twenty-one) in and out of these rooms to take statements, ask questions, cops plying their peculiar forms of conversation. It was hard, after spending a day in and out of those rooms, to engage in normal conversation with normal people – the leading question was an occupational hazard. James frequently had to remind himself to ask David if anything “interesting” had happened at work rather than something “unusual.” His colleagues with families found it even harder: children and criminals often hid the truth, but for different reasons. At home, you wanted to make it safe for your kids to tell you everything; at work, you knew you had to catch a mutt in a lie. There were ways to make it safe
to tell the truth, and ways to make it hard to hide it, and the tactics were different. He knew a lot of detective-mums and detective-dads who didn’t leave enough of the investigative mind at work. There was no room for love in an interview, but you had to find it in yourself again when you went home.

He wondered how well that skillset was developed here. With these people, who rarely brought in a person they didn’t know, it had to be hard to create and maintain the atmosphere you needed to fish out something hidden. The interview room was a place where the law traded safety for the truth. But there was no motivation to trade the truth if you didn’t feel you could be endangered, and Wingate had to admit, this place felt like everything was between friends.

Still, he marvelled at the amount of activity here. The jail cells seemed permanently empty, and yet the phones rang off the hook. The waiting area in front of Staff Sergeant Wilton’s desk was always busy. There were desks in the pen, rather than cubicles, and it created the aura of a squad room chock-a-block with humanity. Even the unoccupied desks, piled with papers, coffee cups, family photos, desk calendars, Rolodexes, and pens, seemed poised to burst into action. All this with a staff of sixteen, only eight or nine of whom were in during daytime hours. The station house was a tenth the size of Twenty-one, but it was its own thing, in its own scale, and it was alive.

He’d been through difficult adjustments before. His life had felt like a chain of difficult adjustments – this one didn’t really rate – but he was hoping the day would come when he wouldn’t have to question anymore where he fit in. He’d just
be
. Back at Twenty-one, he’d been respected, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually been liked. Naturally, a gay cop wasn’t going
to end up being “one of the guys,” but he wondered if his sexual orientation actually had anything to do with it. He suspected they’d looked on him as the one who’d report an internal irregularity, the narc in their midst. They’d never had a reason to suspect him on this level, and in fact he’d turned a blind eye as often as the next guy. But there was a wall between him and his fellows and he would never know now what it had been made of. Or how to avoid the same thing here. Certainly being who he was in a small town wasn’t going to be any easier than it had been in Toronto. He’d already decided no one would know that side of him here. There was no reason to think he’d have cause to advertise it; he wasn’t interested in meeting anyone and even if he were, he doubted there’d be an opportunity. After David’s death, that part of him had gone to sleep, and he didn’t care if it ever came back.