None So Blind (17 page)

He realized now that he’d lost his objectivity. Three years earlier, he had watched helplessly as his own mother fought a war against a killer. Like his mother, Marilyn was Old World and honed by hardship, and he’d felt the echo of his mother’s pain and the same impotence to make the world right for her. But unlike Gordon, he had tried. No matter how overwhelmed he’d felt, he had tried to give Marilyn what she demanded. Not in handholding, but in action. Gordon had not. He had escaped into the false balm of bars and drugs, dropped out of college to take a job as a bartender, and as soon as he had saved enough for a plane ticket, he had headed to Paris. Never to return.

Until now.

Green’s brief glimpses of the man two decades later had not improved his opinion of him. Gordon had not grown up during his sojourn in Europe, and now he was back home, drawn not by filial affection but by the whiff of inheritance money, hovering like a crow around carrion, hoping for easy pickings. He had done some work to fix up the house, but more likely with an eye to increasing its sales value rather than to help out his mother.

Those very same qualities of laziness and detachment, however, made Gordon a poor candidate for vengeance. Rosten’s killer had passion, intensity, and a memory as tenacious as an elephant. Reluctantly, Green conceded that Gordon probably didn’t care enough — about his sister’s death or Rosten’s undeserved freedom — to right the scales of justice himself.

The stairs creaked and Green looked up just as Sharon appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, rumpled with sleep.

“I thought I smelled coffee.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She came into the room to peer at his scribblings. “What’s going on?”

“I couldn’t sleep. The case was going around and around in my head, so I thought …”

She went to the coffee maker and poured the dregs into a cup. “You thought,
Why fight it?
”

He shrugged, unwilling to reveal the depths of his struggle. “But don’t you get up. Go back to sleep. I’ll get Aviva if she wakes.”

She sank into the chair opposite him and cradled her cup sleepily. “It’s kind of nice at this hour. Peaceful. I can actually finish a thought.” She waved a languid hand toward his notes. “You still worrying about the suicide verdict?”

He hesitated. He’d always wanted barriers. Between the turmoil of his job and the peace of his home, between the 4 a.m. blackness and the bright warmth of family. But who understood people, or listened better, than Sharon? “I got a letter in the mail from Rosten today.”

She set her coffee down so quickly it sloshed over the cup.

“Sent just before his death,” he hastened to add, smiling in spite of himself as he rose to mop up the mess. “It suggests he may have been murdered. Do you really want to hear all this?”

“Now I do,” she replied.

“Then I’ll make you some new coffee.” As he set about brewing a fresh pot, he filled her in on the events of the day and on his attempts to narrow down motives and suspects. He kept his voice dispassionate and his private fears to himself.

“Much as I dislike Gordon,” he concluded, “I don’t see him getting all worked up about Rosten at this point. And …” He tapped the next name on his list. “The same applies to the other daughter, Julia. I felt sorry for those kids back then, having their lives blown apart like that just as they were starting to make their own way. Gordon was at Algonquin College, studying something to do with sound technology, and he never made it through. They lost almost two years of their lives between the investigation and the trial — years when they should have been dating and exploring and generally goofing around — and they never got those years back.

“Julia hadn’t really found her feet in the first place. She had trouble sticking with things, and at twenty-four she was still bouncing around, waitressing a bit, working odd jobs like house sitter and dog walker while she picked up random university credits all over the map. She seemed to always quit or get fired. She might have straightened out in time if her sister hadn’t been murdered …”

He stopped to pour Sharon coffee, buying himself time to organize his thoughts. She was drooped over the table with her eyes at half-mast and her chin propped in her hands.

“Marilyn always said the kids had a rough start in life. Their father had been abusive — old story, the kids witnessed it, hid under the table, she stayed with him because she was broke and new to the country and figured she’d lose her kids and be sent back to England if she left him. Eventually, the husband got fed up living in a cramped bungalow with three screaming children and he disappeared. Took the truck and left her with a mountain of debts and not a penny in the bank. The woman moved heaven and earth to raise those kids and give them a good home. But I guess those early years left their scars.”

“And maybe …” Sharon roused herself and sipped her coffee gratefully. “To make up for it, she tried too hard, made excuses for their laziness, and didn’t expect enough of them, so they ended up with no appreciation of hard work.”

He shot her a smile. “You planning to be a slave driver?”

“Absolutely. I see how easy it is for parents to overprotect and rescue their kids. I do it all the time; it’s a mother’s natural instinct. But it does the kids no favours for learning how to manage the real world. And in the end, they don’t respect you for it.”

“That’s it exactly! It’s what I’ve always felt about Julia and Gordon. It’s all about me, me, me. They never saw their mother — or even more so, their stepfather — as anything more than the cook, cleaner, and moneybags. And neither of them, deep down, really mourned Jackie’s death.”

“You don’t know that.”

He doodled beside Julia’s name, trying to articulate his instincts. His head was swimming, and instead of clearing his thoughts, the coffee had only filled him with buzz. “No, I don’t,” he admitted finally. “But I got the impression they mourned the loss of their nice peaceful life and their mother’s attention more than they did their sister. Jackie was the youngest. She’d been spared most of the fallout from their father’s abuse. She was better adjusted and didn’t get into nearly the fights they did with their parents. I think both the older kids resented the fact she had an easier ride.”

“So neither of them would be hell-bent to avenge her death.”

“Well, Julia has the passion, and she can definitely hold a grudge. There were certainly times she got really mad at me.”

“Why?” Sharon asked in surprise.

He tried to think through the sludge. “Partly because she felt rejected. She was clingy and needed a lot of support, which her family wasn’t giving her, so she called me often at first. I was a young man, and the red flags were going up.”

She chuckled sleepily. “Since when did you pay attention to red flags back then?”

“When my sergeant warned me. Julia was vulnerable, he said, and so was I, because Ashley and I were really rocky. I think Julia was also hurt when I got closer to her mother instead. There were odd tensions in the family even before Jackie’s death. Lucas and Marilyn were close, and so was Jackie, whereas Gordon and especially Julia were on the outs. But Julia was much more unpredictable and needy than Gordon, who seemed to drift along. Life was a big ‘whatever’ to him.”

Sharon craned her neck to read Green’s list. “It seems to me the mother has by far the strongest motive of them all.”

“For vengeance, yes. But if Rosten was killed to stop him from unmasking Jackie’s killer, Julia and Gordon become much more credible suspects.”

“But that implies one of them killed Jackie?”

He nodded.

She looked askance. “Why?”

“They were immature, self-centred, and jealous of her.”

“Welcome to Sibling Relations 101,” Sharon said drily. “Usually a motive for tattling and petty payback, not murder.”

He smiled. As an only child, he’d yearned for a brother to play with and to share the burden of his parents, even to play petty pranks on. But as Brian Sullivan, one of eight in an Irish Ottawa Valley farm family, often said, “You’re not missing much.”

But he’d promised himself not to overlook any suspect, however obscure. “Sometimes in a moment of anger or miscalculation, petty payback can turn deadly. And as I said, there were a lot of tensions in the family. Jackie was clearly the favoured child.”

“She was the baby of the family. Older siblings always grumble they’re the favourite,” she countered. “But this was not a murder of impulse or accident. You’ve said so yourself many times. This killer was devious and methodical, and planned out every detail.”

She had a point. Julia and Gordon had been considered at the time of the original investigation, and their movements and alibis verified, but neither had been taken seriously as suspects for the very reasons Sharon gave. Nonetheless, he wrote a note to double-check their alibis in the morning. Sipping his coffee, he tried to remember the original serious suspects in the case. Other than the OPP’s random sex killer, only two stood out: Erik Lazlo, Jackie’s boyfriend at the time, and Lucas Carmichael.

Lucas had been an early contender when Jackie first disappeared. Adult male family members, particularly stepfathers, come under automatic scrutiny. Originally Julia thought Jackie had run away to escape Lucas. She’d never actually seen anything sexual between them but Jackie had always been his little pet. The hugs had been too long and too frequent, the offers to be her chauffeur too eager. Rosten himself claimed to have seen a car resembling Lucas’s in the Morris Island vicinity on the fateful day. But other than Julia’s suspicions, there were no signs of sexual abuse, and Marilyn had provided Lucas with an alibi for the entire day. He had been at home with her, she insisted, preparing the gardens and firewood for the winter. The car had been in the shop.

All these suspicions and alibis were moot, however, because Lucas had been dead almost five months when Rosten was killed.

Which left Erik Lazlo, a callow youth whom Green and the OPP had dismissed as a serious contender because he had an alibi — he had been working with two other students on a project most of the evening. Had they all underestimated him? Lazlo had been bewildered by Jackie’s disappearance and had mouthed all the right platitudes about their flawless relationship and deep respect for each other. He’d been momentarily affronted when Green questioned his sincerity, but after a brief flare of temper, he had tripped over himself trying to co-operate.

He’d been the first to point the finger toward Rosten. The professor had been giving Jackie private tutoring in the evenings, Lazlo said. Also, Rosten had told Jackie, whose class was studying algae growth in different water conditions, that the Morris Island area near his cottage provided interesting contrasts. On the day of her disappearance, Jackie had planned to hike in there to collect water samples. Maybe Rosten knew she’d gone, Lazlo had said. Maybe he knew she’d be alone.

This, coupled with the confirmation of his alibi by his fellow students, had been enough to point suspicion away from him and squarely at Rosten. A clever sleight of hand? It had been difficult to pinpoint Jackie’s time of death precisely, given the week’s delay in finding her body and the highly variable ambient temperature in the woods in late October. A forensic entomologist had been consulted, and maggot reproduction had estimated her death within a twelve-hour window shortly after she went on her fateful hike, but that time frame was still tentative.

There was still plenty of time for Lazlo to slip through the cracks of his alibi. Green put a bold asterisk beside Erik Lazlo’s name on the suspects’ list, with a note to review every scrap of his evidence and to ask Gibbs, the Internet wizard, to track him down.

Significantly, Erik Lazlo was the only suspect who qualified for both motives.

T
he
boxes of microfilm and court transcripts were sitting in the incident room when Green arrived at 7a.m. He was buzzing with caffeine, but the arrival of daylight had brought a little equanimity as well. He eyed the boxes warily. The Carmichael murder case had generated hundreds of reports and witness statements, most of them irrelevant to the case at hand. A rookie would have to do the initial search.

Instead, he busied himself putting his lines of inquiry up onto the whiteboard while waiting for the briefing to start. Levesque arrived shortly afterwards and he barely had time to fill her in before the rest of the team arrived. Levesque led them quickly through the updates and new assignments. Peters was to re-interview all the witnesses from the trains and the hospital by phone, while Gibbs had been tasked with tracking down Erik Lazlo and getting Rosten’s phone and bank records. He had already secured the warrants for the latter.

“We’re still waiting for the Horizon House phone records because of the other users involved, but the pay phones at the Kingston and Ottawa train stations should be in soon. And the bank records on that joint cottage account are already in.” Gibbs looked excited as he flourished a faxed page. “There’s a hefty balance of $76,901 in that account. The wife never seems to touch it. Almost all the activity is with the property management firm. Large deposits, presumably rental cheques, go in and small ones go out, including a withdrawal of five hundred dollars earlier this month —”

“Probably for the spring cleanup,” Leveque said. “But verify it.”

Gibbs nodded. “Yes, ma’am. But there is one really interesting withdrawal made from the bank’s Belleville branch four days before Rosten’s death, for fifteen hundred dollars.”

Green had been listening quietly from the back of the room, letting Levesque run her case, but now he sat bolt upright. Only a few twoonies and loonies had been found at the cottage. “Fifteen hundred dollars! For curry, Scotch, and a couple of taxi rides?”

Everyone absorbed this startling twist. “Perhaps he bought something to give to his daughter,” Levesque offered.

“She never mentioned it, and if he bought something, where is it? Did either the Kingston or Ottawa taxi driver mention any other stops that day? Like the post office? Detective Okeke?”

Levesque glanced at her new detective, who met her unspoken query with a bewildered frown. Green suspected he hadn’t thought to ask. More sloppy detective work.

“The Ottawa taxi driver was pretty vague, sir, and I … I didn’t ask.”

Before Green could open his mouth, Levesque headed him off. “Then let’s get him back in. ASAP!”

Okeke slunk out of the room, leaving an electrified excitement in the room. Everyone sensed a potential major breakthrough in the case. An extra thousand dollars in missing cash was a huge mystery. By comparison, the rest of the briefing was mundane. A luckless rookie from General Assignment was given the dull but crucial task of combing through the original Jackie Carmichael case records. As everyone was filing out, Green overheard Peters grumbling to Gibbs about being stuck at her desk on the phone, re-interviewing witnesses. Green smiled in secret sympathy. Peters was a bulldozer and he did not envy her mild-mannered husband the task of keeping her frustrations in check.

“Tracing Rosten’s last day and all his conversations is important, Sue,” he said. “What if he made some innocent remark or let something slip that could save us days of legwork?”

“But it’s old ground —”

“It’s fresh eyes, and you don’t have to look at it all. The General Assignment detective will look through it for anything suspicious, any loose ends or questionable alibis. Just keep an eye on him. I’m especially interested in Jackie’s boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Erik Lazlo. He may be more devious than we thought. But look for any disputes or jealousy, anyone who might have motive to kill her —”

“Like the wife, sir?”

Green was startled. “What wife?”

“Rosten’s wife. If he was trying to get it on with Jackie … Mrs. Rosten was stuck at home with two babies, probably feeling ugly and fat and old, while hubby is chasing twenty-year-olds. A woman scorned and all that.”

Green cursed his own 4 a.m. stupidity. He had considered her during the initial investigation years ago, for exactly the reasons Peters gave, especially given the proximity of Jackie’s body to her cottage. But he had quickly dismissed the idea. Victoria Rosten had been home without a vehicle or babysitter, and he recalled a friend had dropped in for a drink at some point in the evening of Jackie’s disappearance. But the actual time of Jackie’s death was approximate and parents had been known to let their children sleep in the car when they went out.

Victoria Rosten had been neither ugly nor fat, and at twenty-nine hardly old, but he knew from Sharon and Ashley’s experience as young mothers that reality had little to do with it.

“Good catch, Sue,” he said. “Wife, too.”

Down the hall, the elevator door opened and Detective Okeke emerged with a very nervous young man in tow. The taxi driver, Green surmised, impressed by the fast detective work. As soon as he could, he headed to the video control room. Levesque and her sidekick were already crowded inside, conferring with Bob Gibbs, who was fiddling with the video equipment. On the monitor was the image of the interview room where the witness sat alone, rigidly still with his hands in his lap.

“Who’s doing the interview?” Green asked as he squeezed inside.

She looked at him, unreadable. “I am. Okeke will observe.” She brushed past him out the door with Okeke on her heels. Gibbs stole an uneasy glance at Green, obviously not wanting to be caught in the middle. Green smiled his most disarming smile.

“Good work on Rosten’s warrants, Bob.”

Gibbs flushed crimson. “Thank you, sir.”

He was saved from further conversation by Levesque opening the interview room door. She stepped into the frame carrying a file and her notebook. Gibbs and Green watched in silence as she ran through the formalities. The taxi driver flashed his gaze toward the camera, swallowed, and blinked several times. Green leaned in, puzzled. What did the cabbie have to fear? His papers were all in order. He had immigrated from Pakistan six years earlier, and his landed immigrant status and taxi licence were both valid. Incredibly, he had not so much as a parking ticket on his record. Was this just an immigrant’s natural fear of the police? Had he helped Rosten buy the diazepam? Or had he told someone else that Rosten was at the cottage?

“Mr. Akhtar,” Levesque was saying, her voice like silk. “Can you please take me through your entire trip with Mr. Rosten, starting from the moment you first saw him?”

Akhtar nodded. Swallowed. “I pick up so many fares, I don’t remember all.”

“But this man was in a wheelchair.”

“Yes, yes. Uh … he came out of the doors, I helped him into the cab, he told me where to go —”

“How did he act?”

“Act, Miss?”

“Sergeant. Was he nervous? Excited, upset?”

“I — I didn’t notice. I was driving. The traffic was heavy. It was rush hour.”

Levesque leaned in uncomfortably close, forcing him back against the wall. He lowered his gaze, whether to avoid her blunt, blue-eyed stare or to look at her breasts, Green wasn’t sure. Obviously irritated, she led him through the rest of his remarkably vague testimony. There seemed to be many details Mr. Akhtar had either not noticed or remembered. Levesque pressed him on every one, to no avail, until she finally caught him in a lie.

“Who picked up the takeout curry, sir?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How is that possible? You would have had to get the wheelchair out of the trunk —”

“Oh yes, yes. I remember doing that.”

Levesque frowned, as did Green. The restaurant owner had already confirmed that the taxi driver picked up the food and paid for it with two twenty-dollar bills. Why was the driver lying? What was he hiding? When the answer dawned on Green, he knocked on the interview door and strode it.

“Mr. Akhtar, I’m Inspector Green,” he said, pointedly ignoring Levesque for maximum shock value. Luckily she caught on and swallowed her annoyance. “You did not drive your cab that afternoon, did you?”

Akhtar snapped his jaw shut and gaped, like a trapped animal.

“Who did you lend your cab to? A friend? A relation?”

“No one,” Akhtar replied with careful dignity. “I drive hundreds of fares. I don’t remember them.”

“This is a murder investigation, sir. False statements not only make it difficult for us to find the killer, but they are also illegal. Much more trouble than letting someone use your cab without a licence. We can investigate all the drivers in your company if you prefer.”

“I don’t have to talk to you. I want a lawyer.”

Green stood over Akhtar, his arms crossed. “At a thousand dollars a visit, that’s your right. But you’re not under arrest here, and your friend will not be either if he co-operates, even if he’s here without papers. We’re not immigration; we need answers about his passenger, that’s all. Then he walks out that door.”

Akhtar was silent a moment. “I will call him,” he said finally. “He will decide.”

Green shook his head. There was too much risk the man would run if he were tipped off. But from Akhtar’s reluctance, he guessed the mystery driver was a close family member. Perhaps even the man’s own brother.

Green softened his stance. “He is not in trouble, Mr. Akhtar. Just let us talk to him.”

Akhtar scowled. He huffed and squirmed before sitting back in his chair and gazing up at the ceiling in surrender. “Kamran Akhtar.”

Barely half an hour later, Levesque was escorting Kamran Akhtar into the same interview room. A glimpse of him confirmed Green’s suspicions, for the family resemblance was unmistakeable. Although this young man was clean-shaven and barely twenty, he had the same slender body and frightened eyes as his older brother. However, he lacked the bravado.

Green took up his position in the video control room while Levesque began her routine. The young man’s fear gave way to relief almost immediately. He spoke softly, his English fluent and almost unaccented.

“I told my brother I wanted to speak to the police. The doctor is wrong about the suicide.”

Levesque smiled encouragement. She sat back as if for a chat, while Detective Okeke tried to blend into the corner. “I appreciate you coming in, Kamran. Your information is important in helping us figure out what happened to him.”

“He was a nice man, Mr. Rosten, and not depressed. He looked very happy to be at his little house.”

As with his older brother, Levesque invited him to start at the beginning and take her through the trip, step by step. “Tell us everything he said and did, no matter how unimportant it seems.”

Dutifully, Kamran began his recitation in flustered, disorganized detail, beginning with his having to ask repeatedly where the destination was, because the cab’s GPS was broken. Rosten eventually suggested he turn off the meter and offered him a two hundred–dollar flat fee for the trip.

“Once we were driving, he said he hadn’t visited Ottawa in twenty years and asked if the best Indian restaurant in town was still the Light of India in the Glebe. He borrowed my cellphone to make an order — a feast, he told me — and then we went to pick it up. I mean, he gave me the money and I picked it up. It was forty dollars with the tip —”

“Was it a meal for one or two people?”

“I don’t know. Possibly two. I gave him some suggestions for dishes. He asked me where I was from and I said Pakistan, and he talked about the troubles there and asked if I was doing okay in Canada. I am studying computer engineering. I told him life was paradise here.” He paused, his limpid eyes growing solemn. “Mostly.”

“And did you make any other stops? At the liquor store, for example?”

“No, but he ordered two bottles of Kingfisher from the restaurant. That’s what I recommended.”

“He didn’t buy a bottle of Scotch?”

Kamran looked affronted. “Oh, no. Scotch wouldn’t go at all.”

Green could see Levesque frowning as she jotted some notes. No beer bottles, either empty or full, had been found at the cottage. Just as Green was willing her to ask about diazepam, she looked up sternly. “Did you make any other stops? I remind you this man has died. Did he ask you to buy anything illegal?”

“Illegal?” Kamran’s eyes widened and he whipped his head back and forth. “We — we did stop once more, but I don’t know what he bought. He told me he was interested in security systems. First he asked me about my cab and did I know where he could buy a good home alarm system here in Ottawa. I think he wanted a small shop where they wouldn’t ask a lot of questions, so I took him to a shop on Gladstone Avenue in Little Italy.”

Levesque leaned forward. Green could hear the controlled excitement in her voice. “And what did he buy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it! This time he asked me to set up his wheelchair and he went in by himself. He was there a long time. I was worrying about my two hundred dollars, and my class that night. He came out with only a very small bag.”

“Did he say what it was or why he bought it?”

“He just said you can’t be too careful in the country these days. And we drove to his cottage.”

“What’s the name and address of this store?”

Levesque was already rising as she jotted down the address. “This is very helpful, Kamran. Detective Okeke here will finish up and ask you to write a formal statement. If you remember any more details, let him know.”

Then she was out the door. It took all Green’s restraint not to follow her. At times like this, he hated his job. Hated the oversight, the administrative minutiae, and the so-called big-picture planning that comprised a day in the life of middle management, while his subordinates did the only job he truly loved. Seizing a case in his teeth and following every tantalizing tidbit to the triumphant end.

Instead, he watched her dash for the stairwell with a glint in her eye that he recognized all too well. She met his gaze as she passed and gave him a faint nod.
Of triumph or of understandin
g
?
he wondered.