The Taken (22 page)

“Let’s go.”

Washington Avenue was lined with chestnut trees, and at the end of it there were two small green spaces and, where it made a “T” with Huron Street, a church. They parked and stepped out and a horripilating thrill went up Hazel’s back. It felt now that she had stepped into someone else’s territory and she wasn’t entirely sure that they were safe. “Would you be offended if I suggested you wait in the cruiser?” she asked him and he said he would be, so the two of them set out along the sidewalks to find the house under a chestnut, with a verandah and a view of both parks and the church. The houses on the south side of the street didn’t afford these views, so they focussed on the northern side of the street. Those houses closer to Spadina lacked the necessary vantage, and they ruled out the first half of the street. Four big Victorian duplexes took up the second half of the street, two with verandahs and two without. But only one stood directly in the shade of a chestnut tree, number thirty-two. Like all of these houses, many of which were owned by the university, number thirty-two was divided into apartments. There were five of them and five buzzers under different names. They buzzed P. Billows, J. Cameron, G. Caro, and D. Payne before they got a response. It was a woman’s voice. “Hello?”

“Police, Ma’am, sorry to disturb you. Who am I speaking to?”

“How do I know you’re the police?”

“I’m in a police uniform and I have police ID. Those will be your first two clues.”

There was a pause, and they heard a window open above their heads. A young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt leaned out to the side of the verandah with her portable phone to her ear. Hazel held her ID up over her head. “What do you want?” said the woman.

“You’re Miss Caro? Or Miss Payne?”

“I’m Gail Caro. What do you want?”

“I wanted to ask you if there have been any recent disturbances in this house. Anything out of the ordinary, anything that required the attention of the police?”

“Like what?”

“I’m asking you. Anything.”

“No.”

“Do you know everyone who lives in this house?”

Her attention had tracked over to Andrew, who was standing with his back to the house, looking down the street. “Who’s that? He’s not in uniform.”

“Plainclothes,” she said, and she could see Andrew stifling a grin.

“How’d you get here? Where’s your car?”

Jeez
, thought Hazel. She’d forgotten how paranoid city life could be. She pointed toward Huron Street, to the cruiser, and the woman leaned farther out the window and looked at it.

“So,” said Hazel. “Who do you know in the house?”

“No one. I see them on the stairs, but I live alone. People come and go from places like this.”

“Is there a basement in the house?”

“There’s storage.”

“Could we come in and look at it?”

Caro paused. “Just hold on a second,” she said, and she closed the window.

“Are you sure you want to go in there?” asked Andrew.

She laid her hand on her Glock. “That’s why I asked you to stay in the car.”

“Don’t you need a warrant?”

“I thought you were the lawyer here, Andrew.”

“I don’t need to know about warrants to settle property disputes.”

“We have cause to enter the premises. And anyway, if she consents, we don’t need a warrant.”

They waited on the porch. After a couple of minutes, Hazel buzzed Caro’s apartment. There was no answer. “I don’t like the feel of this.”

“Let’s go.”

She stood back from the door and called up to the now-closed window. “Miss Caro?” There was no reply.

“Hazel?”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Hazel,” said Andrew, his hand on her forearm. She turned to the street and saw a police car driving up. “The local cavalry have arrived.”

The black-and-white cruiser pulled up in front of number thirty-two, and Hazel saw a man and a woman in the car; the female cop was talking into her radio. “Shit,” she said.

The officers got out of the car. They were both tall and well built, a pair of stars. “Good morning,” said the male officer,
coming up the walk. He was inventorying them both quickly, deciding whether this was going to be routine or not. “What seems to be the problem?” The casual opener, thought Hazel. “Can I see some ID, Ma’am?”

“I’m OPS, Officer. I presume you’ve seen the uniform before.”

“Nature of the call, Ma’am. I just have to be sure.”

She got her ID out, and he took it from her, flipped it open. He studied it briefly and handed it back to her, saying, “Detective Inspector.” He looked at Andrew. “You’re not OPS, Sir?”

“No.”

“She said he was plainclothes,” called a voice from above. It was Gail Caro. “They don’t look like cops. You can get a policeman’s costume from a hundred stores in this town.”

“It’s okay,” called the officer. His nametag said K. Hutchins. “They’re provincial, Ma’am.” He had his arm on Andrew’s elbow and turned to his partner. “Constable Childress will keep you busy for a couple of minutes, Sir. I’m going to talk to your, um, partner.”

She watched Childress lead her ex-husband away helplessly. Hutchins stepped away from the house and onto the lawn and she followed him. The window on the second floor had closed again. “What brings you to Toronto, Detective Inspector Micallef?”

He’d pronounced her name the way anyone who’d only ever seen it written pronounced it.
Mickel-eff
. It made her skin crawl to hear it that way.

“It’s
mih-CAY-liff
, Officer, and we’ve got reason to believe someone living in this house could be involved in an abduction we’re investigating.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Not exactly,” she said. She was pleased to note she was getting what seemed like cooperation. The OPS, of course, had province-wide jurisdiction; she could investigate anything she cared to anywhere she cared to. But the Toronto Police Services weren’t always the biggest fans of what they sometimes called the “Kountry Kops” and you couldn’t always count on friendly support.

“What brings you to this house, then? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t. Let me show you something,” she said. He had to make way for her when he realized she needed to go to her car. She walked down the lawn to the street. She saw Childress had spared Andrew the humiliation of having to sit in the back seat of the black-and-white, but she wondered exactly how long it would take before he had real regrets about agreeing to help her. But as she walked past him, her eyes lowered, he whispered her name urgently.

“I have to get something,” she said.

“It
is
‘damaged.’ The street name. It’s an anagram.”

“What?”

“Detective Inspector,” said Hutchins from the front of the house. “We have other calls … sorry to rush you.”

Hazel carried on to the car and got the photocopied pages of chapters four and five of the story, as well as a copy of the
Westmuir Record
in which the first chapter had appeared. She returned to Constable Hutchins and handed him all the paper. “I better set this up.”

She went over it with him. When she got to the part about the hand in her basement, Hutchins called his partner over and asked Hazel to start again. As she spoke, Andrew crept up and
finally stood with them, and the two Toronto officers passed the pages back and forth. When she got to their reason for being in the city, Constable Childress had the
Record
from May 16 open to page five and looked at the picture of Eldwin beside his name, the picture of him standing in a parking lot. “This your missing guy?”

“We think so.”

“He looks like a used car salesman.”

“I think he might have that kind of character,” Hazel said.

“And has anything happened since the ‘save her’ message?” Childress asked.

“Nothing,” Hazel said. “I think we’re supposed to work through what we’ve been given first –”

“Given?” said Childress.

“Yes. We’re going on hints here.”

“A severed hand is a hint?”

“The hints are backed up. Just in case we didn’t think there was anything urgent about this.”

“Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. So to speak.”

Hutchins backed away from them and went up onto the verandah of number thirty-two. He cupped his hands over the glass in a window on the main floor and tried to look in. Then he buzzed Gail Caro again.

“What?” came her tinny voice.

“Miss Caro, Constable Hutchins of the Toronto Police Services. Come open this door, please.”

“I’m not the landlord,” said Caro, “I can’t just let you in.”

“If I ask you to, you can. It’s just that easy.”

“Hold on a second for god’s sake.”

“You better hope she isn’t calling the RCMP now,” Hazel said, coming up on the porch.

They heard Caro clomping angrily down the stairs.

“Eternal cry here,” said Andrew quietly in Hazel’s ear.

“What?”

“Cherry Tree Lane points you to the street, but it
is
‘damaged’ as well. ‘Cherry Tree Lane’ is an anagram for ‘eternal cry here.’ I think this is a murder scene, Hazel.”

Caro opened the door and stood aside, looking on the small collection of law enforcement on her front porch with an expression verging on disgust. Hazel had to wonder what her face looked like when she needed help from the same professionals she obviously held in such contempt. “I’m not being quoted in any report, I’m just telling you that now,” she said.

“Hold on,” said Childress, getting out her PNB. “Let me just write that down …
not being quoted
. Okay, great. You can go back to your apartment now.”

Caro made haste up the stairs. Hutchins had his flashlight out. “Okay, we’re going to take it from here,” he said. “You two can wait upstairs or on the verandah.”

“All due respect, Officer –”

“Yes,” he said. “All due. We’ll make full disclosure afterwards.”

“Please,” said Hazel.

Hutchins and Childress traded a silent communication. “You have a gun?” asked Childress.

“They do arm us in the OPS.” She turned her hip to them.

“He has to stay,” Childress said.

“Oh, I don’t want to go,” said Andrew, and she narrowed her eyes at him and then threw a glance to her partner. He shrugged.

The entry to the basement was beside the door that led to the upper apartments. Hutchins took the lead, but he kept his gun holstered. She wanted to say something about that, but decided to stay silently grateful that she was invited along on her own ambush. And that Hutchins was in front of her.

The basement door wasn’t locked, and Hutchins opened it on a set of dark stairs. He tried the light on the wall, but it didn’t work. Hazel felt her insides go a little liquid as she recalled her terror at Bellocque’s house. Her breath came in short bursts. Hutchins turned to his partner and whispered, “This is where one of us breaks through a cracked step and lands in a pile of bodies.”

“I saw that one, too,” said Childress. She passed him her flashlight off her belt. It directed a powerful white beam of light into the space in front of them. The stairs were concrete. “So much for that theory.”

“Anyone down here?” called Constable Hutchins. There was no answer. Not much of an ambush, thought Hazel, but she realized as well that the space below them was completely silent. They went down the stairs, the beam of light juddering around in the dark, catching dust and webbing here and there. The basement was cool. Hutchins flipped the switch in the wall at the bottom, and they were standing in a large, single room that ran the length and width of the house. On one wall, standing nakedly against the grey concrete, were the house’s washer and dryer. A fragile drying tree was to one side with
three bras hanging from it. There were five badly constructed wooden storage lockers at one end of the space and they went over to inspect them. Behind the flimsy wood-and-chicken-wire doors, four were empty, and one had a bike in it. Hutchins half-heartedly tried the doors of three that were padlocked. He turned to Hazel. “Nothing here, Detective Inspector. Not much reason here to do anything but turn around and go home. Or take in a show.”

She smiled, a little defeated. Hutchins got out his card and handed it to her. It gave his first name as Kevin and his division as Twenty-one. She snapped it against her hand. “I don’t suppose you know James Wingate?”

“Who?” said Hutchins.

“He came to us from Twenty-one. Last fall.”

“We’re, like, two hundred and fifty men and women at Twenty-one,” he said. “It’s the largest division in the city. Two guys could earn their pensions ten feet from each other at Twenty-one and never meet.”

The hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and she turned around to look behind her. The bare wall at the back of the basement was a smooth concrete surface. She turned back to Hutchins. “He’s a detective. Wingate.”

“Oh, well that’s the other side of the building, Ma’am.”

He shone the light toward the stairs. She kept waiting for something to catch her eye, but all the smooth grey surfaces were blurring together. She held her finger up and walked over to the concrete wall and stood close to it. It was a bare wall, no sign of human fluids on it at all. She smelled the wall, knowing how ridiculous she must look. “Are you a building inspector in your spare time?” Hutchins asked her.

“Not quite. There was blood on the wall in the video. I just wanted to see.”

The officers joined her at the wall, and they all inspected it together. It was a fairly smooth surface, but not so smooth that a recent bloodstain wouldn’t be worked into the small pocks. There was nothing. “If this had been recently cleaned,” said Childress, “we’d smell it. You need bleach to get that much blood out.”

“Why are we here?” said Hazel quietly. “I’m sure he wanted us to come here.”

“Maybe he wanted you here so you wouldn’t be
there.”

She snapped around to the female officer, and her heart started pounding again. “Shit.”

“What could be happening back in Port Dundas with you occupied in Toronto?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

The officers shared a look, and then Hutchins held his hand out to show the way back to the stair.