The Taken (24 page)

“What about the backyard?” she said.

“At the house?”

“Doesn’t it make sense we should be digging back there? Why don’t we ask them if we should dig? See what they say.”

“I see where you’re going. Nick Wise has buried her in his backyard.” They both fell silent, working it through. “We need to know if Eldwin ever lived in that house, Hazel.”

“I agree.” She looked across the top of the keyboard for the button that would unmute the microphone. The laptop made a popping sound to indicate the connection had been reopened. Hazel leaned down toward it. “How do we
save her
if she’s already dead?” she asked, and although it was difficult to make out at first, they could both see the camera already pulling away from its black field.

The darkness resolved into a texture and then a field of cloth appeared and they recognized the weft of a black peacoat seen from the back. The scratching sound continued as the picture widened and shoulders appeared at the top of the screen. A chairback swam into the frame at the bottom. The figure was seated at a table, its head lowered. One of the shoulders juddered in time to the scratching sound: an arm moving like a mechanical toy. The figure was writing.

The surface of the table broadened and when its farthest edge drifted down they saw beyond it, into the gloom of the basement, to the wall with its dark message scrawled. When the camera had completed its zoom-out, Eldwin appeared in his chair, at the distant right edge of the screen, his back to the camera as well, his head also lowered. He was motionless. The image of the compulsively writing arm in the foreground and the still, slumped figure in the background made for a contrast that gave Hazel a cold feeling on the back of her neck.

The figure continued to work and paused to lift a scribbled sheet off the table, holding it up to read it, and then placing it face down to the right. “I’m wondering how this story is going to end,” said a woman’s voice. They waited silently. “I know you can hear me.”

“It’s going to end with you in handcuffs.”

The voice laughed softly. “Oh, I have no doubt about that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we, Hazel?”

“Show us your face.”

“Soon,” said the voice. “But for now, let’s talk.”

“You talk,” said Hazel. “I’ll listen.”

The figure lifted its head slightly. “Who’s there with you right now?”

“I’m alone,” she said.

“That’s not true.”

“You going to cut off my hand?”

“Let’s deal plainly with each other, DI Micallef. We’ll get along better. Who is with you?”

Wingate spoke into the microphone. “This is DC James Wingate.”

“Hello, Detective Constable,” said the voice.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Tell me, DC Wingate. Were you a part of the decision to cancel my appearance in the
Record
on Thursday? I was rather upset to see I’d been bumped from the paper.”

He gave Hazel a searching look, not sure how to answer. She said, “We don’t discuss procedure with the target of an investigation.”

“I think what you mean is you can’t discuss an investigation you’re not leading.”

“Oh I’m –”

“– just a second,” said the voice. She leaned down to write. “Had another idea. They come so fast and furious. Everything connecting.”

“Why don’t you tell us your ideas?” said Hazel.

The head rose again and seemed to be searching in the middle distance. There was a sharp inhalation of breath. “In every pause in a story, something enters. Like a radiowave full of invisible news. Most people can’t hear those pauses. Can you, Hazel?”

“I’m reading between your lines.”

“Yes, yes you are,” said the voice. “I’ve been very pleased. I think we’re doing very well together. Maybe the story will have a different ending than the one I’ve been planning.”

Wingate spoke. “What ending have you planned?”

“Now, now, Detective Constable. Do you read the end of a book before its beginning?” She began to write again. “I knew someone who used to do that. Couldn’t stand the suspense of not-knowing. Let’s just say the
trajectory
of a story has a natural end-point. We’re wired for it, did you know that? The shape of our lives imposes itself on the way we tell stories: a welter of possibilities at the beginning narrows and narrows and inevitabilities appear that obligate us to take certain turns. And then the end is a foregone conclusion. However, twists are possible in such stories as the one we’re telling. Unexpected outcomes. In my experience, it happens only rarely. But we can see.”

“We’ve read chapters four and five –” he began.

“I know,” the voice said.

“How do you know?”

“You were at the house, weren’t you? How would you have known to go if not for those chapters? Excellent reading, by the way.”

Hazel felt her cheeks heat up. Where had this woman been this morning? Had she been in the house? “Is this Gail Caro?” she asked.

The figure put the pen down with a clack. “Oh, don’t be stupid now,” she said. “I’m counting on you to know a red herring when you see one.” She shook her head and muttered
Gail Caro
under her voice. “If I can find you through a computer screen, don’t you think I can see you out in the open?”

“Fine,” said Hazel. “How do we find
you?”

“I’m not hiding,” she said. “Not exactly. You’ll have me when it’s time. But for now, forget about Anonymice, forget about tracing signals, forget about driving up and down the highways and byways of this great province looking for electronic signatures … you’ll just be wasting your time, and you know it.”

“Then why are we talking right now? What is it you have to say to us? Because I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time gabbing with a sick fuck like you. And I
will
find you, on my own time, not yours.”

The figure sighed and came to stillness. Then she turned in the chair and faced the camera. “You already found me,” said Gil Paritas, “and you let me go. What makes you think you can find me again, or keep me if you do?”

“Goddamnit,” said Hazel.

Paritas stared into the camera.
“Great Scott
, she thinks,
I had her in my clutches. And I let her go
. But of course you did. I’m presiding over more than one story at a time, Hazel. The one in
the paper, the one you’re starring in, and the one that’s already been written.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why didn’t you ask me for ID? That would have been a fine twist. Those two nice constables this morning thought to ask for yours. In fact, it was the first thing they settled: that you were who you claimed to be.”

“What would your ID have said?”

“Something that told you I was Gil Paritas. Fake ID’s easy to get, DI Micallef. But the point is, you didn’t question what you were being told. You took what you saw in front of you at face value, and that’s not going to work. Not for what we’re doing.”

“And what are we doing?”

Paritas turned and tilted her head at the camera, quizzically. “We’re solving a murder. I thought you knew that. Didn’t you ask me how to save her if she’s already dead?”

“I did.”

“Well then, don’t you want to know how?”

Hazel felt crestfallen. She imagined Chip Willan on one shoulder and her old mentor, Gord Drury, on the other. Willan’s legs dangled down, his arms were crossed over his chest.
Tsk, tsk
, he muttered,
stegosaur trouble
. Drury leaned into her ear.
You can never give them too much rope
, he said.

“Yes,” said Hazel. “I want to know how.”

Paritas nodded approvingly. “Then let’s carry on.”

“First … I want to know if that man in the chair over there is still alive.”

“You mean Colin?”

“Yes.”

Paritas half turned away from the camera. “Colin? Dear? You still breathing over there?” Eldwin remained motionless in the chair. “He must be sleeping.”

“I’ve got no motivation to listen to you if I think that man is dead.”

“Oh, he’s not dead, just a little hard of hearing.”

“Colin Eldwin!” Hazel called out suddenly. “We can see you! We know where you are and we’re coming to get you! Give me a sign that you can hear my voice!”

Paritas appeared to be watching as intently as Hazel was, her eyes switching back and forth between Eldwin and the camera. She shrugged theatrically. “Maybe he doesn’t respond to bluffs. Or maybe he’s just lost in his own world.”

“We’re turning you off,” said Hazel.

“I’ll say –”

“Give us proof Eldwin is alive.”

“Hold on,” said Paritas. “Let me whisper in his ear.” She turned back toward the table and leaned down. Her face appeared to be close to the table’s surface. Hazel felt ice forming in the pit of her stomach. “Colin?” Paritas whispered quietly. “You awake? There are some nice people here who want to talk to you.” She sat up and looked over her shoulder at them. “I don’t know, guys,” she said. “Maybe you should talk to him.” She slowly raised a hand into view: she was pinching two small pieces of discoloured purple meat between her thumb and forefinger. It took them a moment to recognize them as a pair of human ears. Wingate staggered back from the desk with his hand over his mouth. “But I should warn you,” said Paritas, “he’s never been much of a listener.”

“Oh
fuck,”
said Hazel, and she felt the damp heat rising in her throat –

“Hold on,” said Paritas, and she got up now, and carried the dripping parts over toward Eldwin, who, feeling her footfalls on the floor, sat up stiffly in the chair and turned his face, his eyes gleaming wide in terror. They saw the dark red chasm in the side of his head, and when Paritas pressed the severed ear back into place, Eldwin began to scream. She turned back toward the camera. “I think he’s alive,” she called. “What do you two think?”

Hazel and Wingate were standing behind the desk, unable to speak or move as Colin Eldwin continued to struggle, crying out incoherently, the chair bumping sideways, its feet shrieking against the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard. Paritas pulled the ear off the side of Eldwin’s head and looked at it, a string of thick liquid still connecting it to him. “They make excellent paintbrushes,” she said, coming back toward them. She walked past the table, dropping Eldwin’s ears on top of what she was writing, and continued directly toward the camera. “Now let me ask you: do I have your attention?”

Hazel’s breath was coming in short bursts. “Yes.”

“Good,” said Paritas. “You’ve already heard what you have to do next. Figure it out and we’ll talk again. Make yourselves worthy of
my
attention.” Her gaze went beyond the lens now, to behind it, as if she were staring through the wall they now stood against. “Dean?” she said, and the screen went black again and the green transmission icon vanished.

They dispatched a car to Gilmore anyway, but Bellocque’s house was dark and locked up tight. She knew a warrant to force entry would get them nowhere, but she put it in motion and left it with Sean MacDonald. He’d go in and check every meaningless inch of that cluttered mess of a house and she knew he’d find nothing. They discussed keeping a car on the site, but Hazel remembered Paritas’s words: if they could find them through the internet and in the streets of downtown Toronto, they were probably smart enough not to go back to Bellocque’s.

She put Forbes on the Paritas name and told him to spend the rest of the afternoon unravelling it whatever way he could. A simple search of the telephone book and then county records confirmed, as they presumed, that there was no Gil Paritas anywhere in Westmuir, and Hazel kept her own rueful counsel on that fact, recalling the toss of Paritas’s head when she asked her what the name meant.
Greek for woman-stuck-in-traffic
. And Hazel had watched her flounce down the steps to her car. Not for one instant had Paritas worried that Hazel would not do exactly what was expected of her: she played good-cop/bad-cop all by herself, she laid a bluff, got called, and then showed Paritas her whole hand. And the woman had practically walked out of the station house whistling.
Idiot
, thought Hazel.
You’ve been made to order
.

Forbes was waiting at her office door with some handwritten notes. He reported that web searches on the word had finally brought him to a Latin translation page that gave “paritas” to mean “equal.” But one site offered a more tantalizing translation:
we are the same
.

“As what?” Hazel wondered aloud. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Her and Bellocque? Her and Eldwin?” said Forbes.

“Maybe.”

She went to find Wingate. “We have to tie Eldwin to that house. That’s our next move.”

“I’ll call Childress back. See if she has anything for us yet. And I think it’s time we should get back in contact with Claire Eldwin. She has a right to know.”

“Don’t tell her about the hand,” Hazel said. “Or the ears.” She thought for a second. “Don’t give her any details at all.”

“I’ll handle it.” She seemed to be studying his face. “Skip?”

“Three stories, Paritas said. We know two of them. The third is ‘already written.’ What is that third story, James?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what can you save the dead from?”

There was a long silence, as if they were watching something take shape in the air between them, and then Wingate said, “A lie.”

“A lie.”

He’d already picked up the phone. “If I call and Childress has something we can use, we’re going to have to get into bed with Twenty-one. Are we sure we want that?”

“Will they help? They’re your people.”

“They’ll help, but no one likes to be wrong. If something went south in their own backyard …”

She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t care. Make the call.”

Childress got back to Wingate at the beginning of her next shift, Sunday morning. It came through as a handwritten fax, a dated list on Childress’s notebook paper. The fact that it was off her PNB and not on a piece of scrap paper meant the matter had entered Twenty-one’s caseload on some level and they were already on the division’s radar, whether they wanted to be or not.