None So Blind (16 page)

To her credit, she did, but her expression hardened. “Agreed. For now. But if this blows up in our faces, Mike, you will wear it. You. Is that clear?”

T
hat
threat loomed huge in the middle of the night as Green lay in bed staring at the ceiling. In the stillness, Sharon’s breathing rose and fell softly, and leaves rustled against the windowpane. This wasn’t just about searching for justice or righting a possible wrong, it wasn’t just about his own personal guilt and redemption. It was about his career. With two children under the age of ten and a daughter just entering university, he was staring into an abyss.

Through the darkness, the small alarm clock on his night table glowed 3:42. The last time he’d looked, it had read 3:34. Before that, 3:16. The night inched forward, black and bottomless. Into that dark void, thoughts rushed in, crowding out sleep and replaying his fears in endless, haunting loops.

He had barely moved in over an hour as he tried to will himself to sleep, but still his heart raced as if to outrun an invisible foe.

What if James Rosten had been murdered? That possibility was bad enough — the possibility that he had finally gained his freedom only to be targeted by a killer. There were several people who could have wanted him dead, people who didn’t think his punishment severe enough for his crime or who feared he might kill again. But as unpalatable as that revenge motive was, Green understood it. Accepted it with the kind of sad resignation that cops have to master if they are to survive the sheer unfairness of people’s lives.

But what kept him awake was the other possibility — that Rosten had been killed not to balance the scales of justice but to silence him. To stop him from checking into Jackie Carmichael’s death and digging up information someone was desperate to hide. Which could only mean one thing; James Rosten was not the original killer.

And Green had railroaded the wrong man.

His whole career had been launched by this case. After the embarrassment of botched investigations and failed prosecutions, the senior brass had seized the opportunity to praise him to the skies. Only a junior detective, the police chief had crowed, but a man clearly skilled beyond his years. Green had found himself fast-tracked into Major Crimes and he had never looked back. Until now.

He’d been so damn sure of Rosten’s guilt. Had he been so blinded by his own importance, and by the chance to break this case when the OPP were trying to sweep him aside, that he had failed to see the truth staring him in the face?

Had his whole career been based on a lie?

He tried in vain to wrestle back his panic. Rosten’s death could still be a simple suicide by a man who had finally hit a wall. The favourite food and drink, the beloved cottage locale, the lack of supplies for a prolonged stay — indeed, he had not even brought coffee or cereal for breakfast — all these pointed to a final, deliberate choice. So far, besides the possible evening visitor, the overly clean and freshly swept cottage, even MacPhail’s sloppy work on the autopsy, there was precious little hard evidence to contradict the verdict of suicide.

Just a letter from the dead man and a deep, yawning feeling of dread.

With that dread, at four in the morning, came anger. Irrational, blood-pounding fury. At himself for being so goddamn proud and cocky that he’d put winning ahead of truth. At the OPP, who had frozen him out of the final stages of the investigation. They had not let him follow up on the few loose threads that had niggled at him; Rosten’s claim that he’d spotted a car like Lucas’s on the road near Morris Island; the missing belt used to strangle Jackie, which had not been found in a search of Rosten’s house and which his wife said he’d never owned; even Julia’s initial theory that Jackie had run away to escape her stepfather.

Perhaps if he’d been allowed to continue the investigation himself, he might have found more flaws in the case. And now, once again, he had to rely on the skill and wisdom of others. On Levesque, whose sloppy timeline had obscured crucial gaps, and on Cunningham and MacPhail, who had let preconceptions blur their acumen. They had made the mistakes, but as Neufeld said, if the case blew up in their faces, the blame would land squarely on him. That’s what they paid him for.

He’d made enemies during his twenty-year rise through the ranks. He’d stepped on toes. He’d trumpeted justice and refused to compromise for expediency. He’d been intolerant of mediocrity and indifferent to authority. Every defence lawyer who’d ever lined up against him would be filing appeals. The jackals would be out in force, waiting to feast on the tatters of his reputation.

At 4 a.m., he felt like a trapped dog. Finally he flung off the duvet, slipped out of bed, and tiptoed down the dark staircase. After putting the kettle on for tea, he found a fresh pad of yellow foolscap.
You can’t follow every lead in this investigation yourself, but you can damn well see where they’re going
.

With shaking hand, he began to put his thoughts to paper. He started off by casting the net as wide as he could. No matter how remote the chance or how obscure the motive, there was no fucking way anyone would escape his scrutiny this time. Rosten had spent the last twenty years trying to exonerate himself, and his last letter suggested he was gathering evidence on a new suspect. If he hadn’t gone to the cottage to kill himself — which Green strongly doubted — why had he gone? Why pick the cottage?

To use it as a secret base of operations while he pursued his investigation into the person he suspected of killing Jackie? As a base of operations, it was hardly secret. Surely he realized that once the police tracked him to Ottawa, they’d soon check out all his known hangouts, including the cottage. If he were hiding out to give himself time to investigate, a no-name budget hotel would be smarter.

Had he gone to the cottage because he wanted to check out some evidence at the scene of the crime? This seemed a more likely rationale, although his wheelchair seriously limited his mobility to navigate the rough logging terrain where Jackie was killed.

Or had he planned to use the cottage as a rendezvous place? Not just any place but one with powerful emotional impact. Had he wanted to shake up a witness or confront a suspected killer on the very site of his original crime? That would be so like James Rosten. The man was so intense and focused that he would have met the challenge head-on without thinking of the danger. Or maybe he didn’t give a damn.

Green’s pen hovered over the page.
Keep your options open
, he reminded himself. As tempting as it was to assume Rosten had identified Jackie’s killer and had been killed to silence him, that wasn’t the only possibility. Even if Rosten was innocent, he might have been killed by someone who believed he was guilty. In either case, however, it had to be someone who knew he’d be at the cottage. Who might he have told? The suspected killer? A witness? Or perhaps he had invited one person but someone else had overheard or been told of the intended meeting.

The most obvious person for him to invite was his daughter Paige. He’d contacted her before and had even left an unanswered message. Perhaps he hoped to show her the cottage she’d enjoyed as a baby. But would she have killed him? Her father’s crime had devastated her childhood and made her fear for her son’s normalcy, but she had seemed more bewildered than horrified by her own visit with him and she had been buying herself time to decide how much she would let him back into her life.

A far more likely suspect was her husband, Tom, who clearly wanted no part of his father-in-law’s life. If Rosten had told Paige he was going to the cottage, Tom could easily have found out. He had a temper and a fierce protectiveness toward his wife and child. Green wasn’t sure he himself would feel any different in his shoes.

Green put Tom Henriksson at the top of the suspects list.

Next on the list were Rosten’s wife, Victoria, and second daughter, Pam, neither of whom wanted him back in their lives. They’d refused all involvement, even after his death. Rosten may have been anxious to build bridges, but would he have risked rejection by contacting them? If so, which one?

Once again Green tried to put himself in Rosten’s shoes, and his answer to the first question was a definite
yes
. Rosten never backed away from conflict, and he was well beyond being hurt. When the news of his wife’s desertion reached him at the end of the trial, he’d reacted with rage rather than despair. Not at her but at Green. Green was to blame; his incompetence and his personal need to win the case against all the contrary evidence had led to the prosecution and verdict.

If Rosten wanted to reconnect with his wife or child, even if for no other reason than to discuss the future of the cottage, he would have plunged right in.

Of the two, Green favoured the wife. Rosten had had an intimate, seven-year relationship with her, and he’d had twenty years inside a cell to wonder what had become of her. Had she found a new man? Re-established her career? Before the birth of the twins, she had worked as an emergency room nurse in a hospital in New Jersey. While he was at Princeton, apart from his stipends and research grants, her income had been their main means of support.

A familiar story
, Green had thought at the time of the trial. The wife supports her husband through his schooling and once he’s reached the gates of success, he tosses her aside her for a nubile co-ed ten years her junior. In this case, Victoria had experienced more than simple betrayal; she had also had to face the soul-destroying self-doubt of having shared her life with a killer. During the trial, the media and the gossip circles had been ruthless. She must have neglected him or turned a blind eye, they said, or, worse, she must have been utterly emotionally divorced from him in order to miss the clues to his true nature.

In the end, shattered and full of shame, she had fled back to her parents.

It was clear that she had neither forgiven nor forgotten in the past twenty years. A nurse would have easy access to diazepam and know all about its lethal effects. Moreover, she was perhaps the only person who could have made Rosten distraught enough to chug the whole bottle of Scotch.

Green put her name below Tom’s. She was a strong suspect, possibly the strongest, but much depended on how fiercely she had clung to her outrage and how willing she was to re-open the wounds by visiting him. Having put fifteen hundred kilometres and twenty years between them, perhaps she’d prefer to leave it that way.

The most straightforward way to verify that was to check her phone records. Rosten had no phone of his own but had used both the Horizon House phone and nearby pay phones to make the few calls he had. If he had contacted her, the trail should be easy to trace. However, Green would need a warrant for that — and on the basis of MacPhail’s suicide verdict and his team’s sloppy investigation, no judge would ever grant one. Green would have to find another way to check her whereabouts. Neighbours and work colleagues could be discreetly interviewed, but in the end, someone would have to confront her directly.

The second daughter, Pam, was a long shot. What kind of person had she become and how likely was it that she would still harbour a bitterness intense enough to fuel murder? Her father had never been in her life, and unlike Paige, she clearly wanted it that way. Did she have the same soft, anxious core as her identical twin, or was she tougher? Could Rosten have said something to make her travel fifteen hundred kilometres to kill him rather than simply hanging up on him? But Green didn’t know the woman. He didn’t know how damaged and irrational she was, and he didn’t intend to dismiss her without a routine check.

Conduct background inquiries via Halifax Police
, he wrote next to both Victoria’s and Pam’s names.

He rested his head in his hands and took a deep breath. The clock now read 4:56 — still more than an hour before his alarm was set to ring, if Aviva didn’t wake him and Sharon first. Sharon was still on maternity leave. She would nap in the afternoon while Aviva did, whereas he faced another whirlwind day as the investigation swung into action. He had ordered a blitz; now he had to deal with the consequences.

His black mood had lifted slightly, but his head ached, his eyes felt like sandpaper, and sleep still seemed as elusive as it had at 3 a.m. He abandoned all hope of it and rose to make a pot of coffee while letting his thoughts range over other possible suspects. Among them, the Carmichaels.

No one ever recovered from the murder of a loved one, be it sister or child. Life was forever on another plane, the ache as bottomless after twenty years as on the first day, the rage and despair as corrosive as ever. A survivor became used to living with the pain, so that eventually it did not consume their days. But the least reminder could reopen the floodgates, as Green knew from his own parents, who would retreat into days of impenetrable silence.

Rosten’s mere release could have triggered such floodgates. Or perhaps it was something even more potent, such as a phone call from him or a visit to the place where Jackie had died.

Returning to his seat with a freshly brewed cup of coffee, Green applied his thoughts to the first, and most palatable, Carmichael suspect. Gordon. He had never liked the man. Twenty-two years old at the time of his sister’s death, he had preferred to hang out with his buddies, playing music and smoking dope, rather than providing support to his mother and stepfather. Lucas had retreated into a stunned alcoholic stupor and Marilyn had gone on the warpath, so neither had been easy to comfort. Perhaps it was expecting too much of the young man to see through their behaviour to their need. Nurturance was not a strong point for most twenty-something males.

Certainly it hadn’t been for Green himself. He hadn’t known how to comfort the family, and had responded to Marilyn’s rage by redoubling his efforts to bring Rosten to justice. In the dead of night two decades later, he saw just how poorly he had handled his own emotions as well. Beneath the cockiness, the bravado, and the cop attitude, he’d been scared. It had been his first case, and as it wore on, the expectations of the police, the media, and, most of all, the family had left him terrified. Marilyn would tolerate no less than the case solved and the killer brought to justice. Preferably over hot coals.