Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (67 page)

“Did he elaborate, or did you ask if he was talking about himself?”

She shook her head. “His comment was off topic. Worse than that, it was feeding this individual’s anxieties. The fear that everyone is looking at you and thinking bad things about you is a core component of social phobias.”

“Was it usual for Fraser to say things like that?”

Leslie glanced across at her supervisor, and again Sharon had the feeling she wanted to say much more. “Matt tended to be more cynical than most, but given what he’s been through, that’s hardly surprising.”

“Did the others know about his past?”

“He never spoke of it. Of course, Dr. Emmerson-Jones and I knew, and—”

“It was not relevant to his treatment,” Emmerson-Jones cut in. “He needed to get out into the world again. That takes a well-planned series of small steps, not a whole lot of talking about the past.”

“Still, I imagine it was hard for him to just turn the memories off,” Mike said in an affable tone beneath which Sharon could recognize the sarcasm. “Did he talk about it indirectly? Allude to any strange worries or thoughts?”

Leslie was shaking her head. “In retrospect, I can see he’s been getting more agitated in recent weeks, as if he couldn’t get his mind off things. The last session, he kept scribbling furiously in his binder, he shifted in his chair and twirled his pen, he just couldn’t seem to relax. I was surprised when he missed the group last week, because he’s usually so conscientious.”

“Looking back at what you know about him now and what he revealed in discussions, have you got any idea if he felt he was being followed, and by whom?”

Emmerson-Jones silenced Leslie with an abrupt slice of his hand. “This is clearly beyond the issue of public safety, Inspector. You’re trying to pry information out of us to further your investigation.”

“They’re one and the same,” Mike replied, with an edge creeping into his voice. “Somebody might have been stalking him and waiting for the chance to settle accounts. In which case he may be in danger. Or dead.”

Emmerson-Jones and Leslie Black exchanged looks, and Sharon saw a sudden uncertainty in his. He doesn’t know what to do, she thought, because he doesn’t know his patient from Adam, beyond the anxiety rating scales Fraser had probably filled in during the initial consult. In clinical matters, Emmerson-Jones was not one to venture out on a limb. If he didn’t have his numbers and his data to support his opinion, he said nothing. Yet here, to say nothing might land him in serious professional trouble. In that glance to Leslie Black, he was asking her to go out on the limb for him. Clever little prick, Sharon thought with gritted teeth.

But if Leslie was aware of the dual purpose she served, she seemed unfazed. Sharon sensed she loved limbs, perhaps because she knew the clearest and farthest views could be had from them.

“Yes,” she said without a moment’s pause. “He did believe he was being followed, and he did say that some people would stop at nothing, even after years, and so he—”

Belatedly, she checked herself with a look of dismay, but Mike was not to be denied.

“He what?”

Leslie shifted in her chair, clearly reluctant. “Well, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. Out of context, it sounds ominous, but I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.”

Mike waited patiently, his pen poised.

As the silence ticked on, Leslie obliged. “He said he might have to stop them first.”

“Oh,
really!”
Emmerson-Jones interjected. “Idle talk in the therapy group, nothing to base a suspicion on, Inspector. People say all kinds of things!”

Mike’s eyes remained on Leslie. “But you think he was serious?”

“I don’t think he was being glib,” she replied slowly. “Matt spoke so rarely that when he did, you knew it was something he’d been worrying over for weeks.”

“Mrs. Black!” the psychologist exclaimed. “If you knew of a possible threat, you should have come to me at once!”

“I didn’t see it as a threat,” she countered, flushing. “Not in the context. I had the impression he meant he’d consult a lawyer.”

“For a restraining order, you mean?” Mike asked.

“It sounded like something of that sort.” Mike’s eyes narrowed. “If he went to a lawyer and not the police, then chances are he knew who was following him. Did he give a hint? Someone from the trial?”

Leslie sat a long while in silence as if she were mentally reliving the group discussions. Finally, she sighed and shook her head. “The group didn’t know about his past, and so his comments were always circumspect. It might have been—”

“I think that’s enough speculation, Mrs. Black. The police need evidence, not your subjective interpretation of what a patient might have meant.” Emmerson-Jones rose and reached for his suit jacket. “I believe we’ve helped you much more than we’re obliged, Inspector. Let’s hope this whole matter is resolved quickly and with happy results.” He held open his door and extended his hand. “Good day.”

“Arrogant putz,” Mike muttered as he followed Sharon out the door. She punched the elevator button and swung around with a mock glare.

“Yes, and thanks to you, he’s going to nail me with the Director of Nursing tomorrow morning. I was handling it my way, Green. How’s he ever going to believe I had no control over you?”

The elevator door slid open, and she stomped in. Once inside, he gave her his crooked grin. “He’s a shrink. That should be obvious to his finely-honed intuition.”

“Yeah, right. Some cops get hunches, and others plod through the facts. Shrinks are no different. Emmerson-Jones has no intuition, but what he does have is a very stiff poker up his ass.”

He laughed, caught her hand and pulled her into his arms. “Sorry. Will you be in big trouble?”

“What can they do, fire me? They can’t afford to, with the shortage of nurses and my ten years’ experience. So they’ll sweep it under the carpet, I’ll stay out of Emmerson-Jones’ way for a while—which will be my pleasure—and it’ll be business as usual. However, you won’t get off that easily. You owe me big time, Green, and a tub of Ben n’ Jerry’s isn’t going to do it.”

“So what’s your pleasure this time?” He bent to nuzzle her neck. “Maybe...?”

She pushed him away. “Not smelling like that! Cooking dinner would be a start.”

The elevator jolted to a stop on the main floor. As the doors opened, he kissed her lightly on the nose. “Okay, I just need to make one quick stop back at the station—”

“Green! It’s past five o’clock!”

He led the way through the heavy glass doors into the garish afternoon sun. Just ahead, his car was parked illegally at the curb with a police sticker slapped on the dash. He paused with his hand on the handle. “This will only take a minute. I have to look something up.”

“For this case?”

He nodded and slipped into the car. “Leslie Black got me thinking of something. Half an hour, I promise, and then I’ll whip up the meanest Kraft Dinner you’ve ever had. And to while away the time...” He fished in his wallet and held out a scrap of paper. “You could always take a peek at this house on your way home and see what you think.”

Without making a move, she grinned. “In half an hour? No time. Wouldn’t want my Kraft Dinner to get cold.”

Five

As he drove back
towards the police station against the rush hour, Green glanced at the gridlock stretching along the Queensway in the opposite direction and ruefully acknowledged that his promise of half an hour had been hopelessly optimistic. Especially since he had to travel all the way out to the end of the earth to reach his new home.

The squad room was deserted when he arrived, but fortunately in his absence the records clerk had delivered the Fraser file to his office, where it sat in two large boxes on his desk. Inside were pages of reports, witness statements and interview summaries, in no particular order as far as he could tell. Sitting at his desk, Green resisted the urge to get sidetracked by the interviews and instead riffled rapidly through the pages until he found the name he was looking for.

In his therapy group, Matt Fraser had hinted that he was thinking of consulting a lawyer in order to stop some harassment, real or imagined. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he had used the same lawyer who had defended him so successfully ten years earlier.

Josh Bleustein.

Green groaned. Over the past fifteen years, Green had not won many popularity contests with the Ottawa Defence Bar, mainly because the cases he handled rarely made them look good, but Josh Bleustein had tangled with him more than most. Bleustein was a brawler who took more pleasure in eviscerating a witness on the stand than in arguing the finer points of law. Nearing sixty, a two-pack a day and six-pack a night man with three chins and a paunch to rival Buddha, Bleustein continually surprised people by turning up each Monday morning still alive and well.

And ready to scrap. Josh Bleustein would sooner throw him out of the office than cooperate with him about a confidential case. Green pulled out his day planner, flipped it open to the next day and contemplated the mass of blue ink that filled the page. He had a full day of meetings with his counterparts in urban police forces around the province. The bane of middle management life. The event was about the growing threat of biker gangs, and it included lunch to facilitate networking, as the corporate luminaries called it. He couldn’t skip it, because Superintendent Adam Jules, no doubt with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, had volunteered him to present
CID
’s new computerized geographic profiling system.

Fortunately, Green had learned a few middle management tricks of his own over the years, and he’d hastened to draft into service an eager-beaver new detective who actually knew how to operate the thing and who would happily demonstrate his superior wisdom to a room full of inspectors in exchange for a few brownie points in the eyes of the brass. But Green knew that he himself would still have to be there, to look as if he knew what was going on.

But all of this smoke and mirrors technical wizardry paled in comparison to a real live case, and Green was getting an increasing sense that Matt Fraser’s disappearance was serious stuff. There was no body or blood stains to point to foul play, but Green knew something bad had happened. He was like a dog on the scent, and right now the trail led to Josh Bleustein.

A phone call to Bleustein’s firm netted him an answering machine and an after-hours emergency number at which there was no answer. Like it or not, meeting Bleustein would have to wait until tomorrow, until he could find time to sneak out of his seminar.

Outside his little alcove office, a door slammed and footsteps thudded across the carpet. Then Green heard a sigh. He peeked out to see Brian Sullivan drop into his chair and flick on his computer. Green glanced at his watch, which read almost six o’clock. He’d left Sullivan at the rooming house over two hours ago, and he wondered what Sullivan could be trying to do on the case at this point. The body had been removed to the morgue to await post mortem in the morning. Ident and the fire investigators would almost certainly still be at the scene, completing their painstaking collection of physical evidence. In the morning, there would be plenty to do chasing down the results of the physical search and canvassing the street again for witnesses. Maybe, as a break from that plodding and often futile exercise, Sullivan might like to slip in a quick visit to everyone’s favourite defence attorney.

Green picked up his notes and Josh Bleustein’s office address and sauntered out of the office. Except for Sullivan, the squad room was empty. The huge former linebacker hunched over his keyboard, sweat trickling down his temples and his sausage fingers dancing nimbly over the keys. His florid complexion had faded, but a dusky hint of high blood pressure remained, reminding Green of the price they all paid for the job. Sullivan was searching the internal police database, and when a mosaic of tattoos filled the screen, he leaned forward to squint at them.

“What are you working on?” Green asked.

“MacPhail and I found part of a tattoo still intact on the victim’s hip just above his groin. Most of it is burned away, but I can make out part of what looks like a young girl. I’m checking to see if it’s on the system.”

“Girlfriend tattoos are pretty common,” Green observed doubtfully. “Part of the love and possession theme of the jailhouse.”

“Yeah, but this is a pretty sophisticated job. Curly ringlets, sort of like Shirley Temple, if you remember your old movies. MacPhail’s going to try to clean it up, so it might help us get an
ID
on the guy. Ident’s hit a big fat zero with usable prints. Fingers are too burned, and the empty bottle had nothing but smudges.”

“So we’ll be looking at teeth or
DNA
.”

“But the tattoo might give us some possible relations to check it out against.”

For a moment, Green felt a surge of excitement. Shirley Temple had been a precocious child star with a girlish innocence and a coquettish flair that would be perfect fuel for a pedophile’s dreams. But Green was reluctant to subject Fraser’s sister to the experience of
DNA
comparison unless he had something more substantial than intuition. No tattoo had been listed among Fraser’s distinguishing marks at the time of his arrest. It was possible he’d had it drawn since then, in which case his sister probably wouldn’t know about it. On the other hand, how likely was she to know about a little girl on his groin anyway?

In the silence, Sullivan rubbed his bloodshot eyes and suppressed a yawn. “Jesus, I’m getting old. These screens are getting harder and harder to see.”

Green clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re on the slippery slope, buddy. Put Gibbs on it. He’s ten years younger than us, and you know how he loves this detail stuff. Besides, I’ve got something else I need you to do.”

Sullivan glanced with alarm at the paperwork in Green’s hand. “What, now?”

He knows me too well, thought Green, no matter how casual I try to be. He knows that when I’m on the scent, I forget to eat or sleep, even forget that a day has only twentyfour hours in it. “Tomorrow. It shouldn’t take long.”