None So Blind (19 page)

Marilyn broke into his thoughts. “Why?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

He chose his words with care. “Rosten had a visitor at the cottage before he died.”

Her eyes widened. “And you think Percy —?”

“We have to eliminate all possibilities, including him.” Green tried to sound casual. “When Rosten met with you, did he mention he’d be at his cottage that night?”

A floorboard creaked in the back of the house. Marilyn sucked in her breath. Gave her head a brusque shake.

“Maybe later, in a phone call?”

“He never called. I told you that.”

“Just for the record, can you tell me where you were last Thursday evening?”

She blinked, as if trying to refocus. “I was here.”

“Anyone see you or talk to you?”

“Well, no. I was in the basement cleaning. Good heavens, why would I …?”

“What about your children?”

“What about them?”

“Maybe they can confirm that?”

“Oh.” In the silence, he could hear distant rustling. Her hands tightened in her lap. “Julia hadn’t arrived yet and Gordon was out with friends. Drinks and a movie, I think.”

“Is he here?”

“No. I mean, he is, but he’s asleep.”

Green suspected the furtive noises he’d heard in the back hall were from Gordon. “What time will he be awake? I’ll send a cruiser out to pick him up and bring him to the station.”

On cue, a door banged in the back of the house and Gordon appeared down the hall, looking groggy and bewildered. The stink of stale booze and cigarettes wafted around him.

Marilyn jumped up to intercept him. “Inspector Green has some questions for you about the night you went to the movies with Phil.”

Gordon feigned confusion, a performance Green doubted would earn him an Academy Award. “Why?”

“We’re tracing Rosten’s movements on the evening he died,” Green said. “Who he might have met with, what transpired during the meeting. So if you can give me Phil’s contact info and tell me what movie you saw — a receipt would be very helpful —” Green flipped open his notebook.

“We didn’t go to a movie. We got there too late, so we just went to a club.”

“What club?”

Gordon flopped into one of the aging armchairs, put his bare feet on the table, and pulled out a half-empty pack of Gauloises. Marilyn pursed her lips. In small defiance, he tucked one into the corner of his mouth, unlit. “I don’t remember. Several, I think.”

In the silence, Green’s cellphone buzzed. Levesque. With an effort, he ignored it. Waited, pen poised.

“Maverick’s. Zaphod’s.”

“Phil’s name and number?”

Gordon scowled. “I don’t want my friends hassled by the cops. Check the clubs, they’ll remember me.”

“His name is Phil Rudinsky and he lives in Orleans,” Marilyn said.

Green was just about to record that when Gordon heaved a sigh. “I wasn’t with Phil. I ditched him at Maverick’s and went off with some other guys.”

“Names?”

“Like I said, I don’t want them hassled.”

I bet you don’t
, thought Green. “What about Erik Lazlo? Do you ever see him anymore?”

A brief flicker of alarm crossed his face. “Erik? Fuck, no. Haven’t seen him in years.”

Why the alarm
, Green wondered? “Do you know where we can reach him?”

Gordon blinked several times, as if weighing his answer. “Not a clue. I heard he was married and living in Hungary.” He straightened as his wits took hold. “What the hell is this, anyway? Why are you dragging up Erik and all this old shit? You think …?” His eyes narrowed. “You think someone killed the guy?”

Green closed his notebook and stood up. “We’re pursuing several lines of inquiry. Routine. If you remember the names of anyone you saw on Thursday night, or the whereabouts of Erik Lazlo, ask them to contact me.” On his belt, his cellphone buzzed again. Levesque again. Two calls in less than three minutes. He excused himself and stepped into the hall to check.

Levesque’s voice vibrated with excitement. “Sir, I’m out at the cottage. We’ve found the camera, and I think you should see this.”

E
ven
in the fast lane of the Queensway, the drive across town to Morris Island took almost an hour. Too restless and keyed up to simply stare at the highway, he phoned Gibbs for an update.

“Any progress on locating Erik Lazlo, Bob?”

“Not yet, sir. We know he graduated from Algonquin in 1996, but he has almost no Internet presence. No traceable social media accounts. Nothing. Weird for an IT guy. He worked for Nortel in Ottawa until it went under, then he moved overseas to some start-up in Eastern Europe. He comes back and forth but we don’t know where he is right now.”

“Family?”

“His parents retired back to Hungary.”

“Business contacts here?”

“That’s who I’m waiting on now, sir.”

“Sounds good. If you’ve got some spare time, see what you can track down on Marilyn Carmichael’s first husband. Apparently Rosten was showing an interest in him.”

“What’s his name, sir?”

Green rolled his eyes at his own stupidity. Years behind a desk had dulled his investigative instincts. He rang off to dial Marilyn’s number. As luck would have it, she was out and Gordon answered.

“What’s our father got to do with anything? He’s been gone for years.”

“Not even birthday cards? Christmas?”

“Not a peep. We’re nothing to him. Mum was nothing to him either.”

“I’d still like his name.”

Heavy breathing. “You
do
think he was murdered, don’t you.”

“We’re pursuing several —”

Gordon interrupted him with a bark of laughter overlaid with contempt. “You’re wasting an awful lot of effort for the slimeball who murdered my sister.”

Green was forced to dodge around an SUV that lumbered onto the highway with a massive boat in tow, oblivious to the traffic. During that moment’s silence, he heard Gordon’s muttered oath. “Are you telling me …
now
… that he didn’t?”

Green wrestled with the steering wheel. “I’m telling you no such thing, Gordon. I’m filling in blanks in our investigation.”

Another soft curse. A deep breath rattled through Gordon’s smoke-wracked lungs. “Percy Mullenthorpe. Can you imagine?”

Green wondered how he could have forgotten. It was a comically elegant name for a thug of a man, but at least it should be easy to trace. Thanking Gordon, he hung up before the man could make any more lucky guesses. Gordon was not as dim-witted as he pretended.

Green had just passed the name on to Bob Gibbs when the turnoff to Morris Island loomed ahead. Several uniformed officers were conducting a methodical grid search of the property around the cottage but Green found Levesque inside. All the windows had been thrown open, but even so, the lingering stench of booze, curry, and death pinched his nose. Levesque and Cunningham were bent over a laptop, peering at an image they had enlarged on the screen. To Green, it looked like abstract art. Nothing but fuzzy streaks and spots.

“Impossible to make out on this machine,” Cunningham was saying. “But maybe with digital enhancement —”

They both looked up as Green entered the room. Levesque’s cheeks were flushed with excitement and even Cunningham looked alive. “This is the closest we’ve got to a licence plate, sir,” Levesque said. “Looks like an Ontario plate, but it’s muddy and the light is too poor in the trees.”

“The old story,” Cunningham added. “Camera’s okay as security cameras go, but no match for this kind of challenge.”

“Rewind,” Green said. “What are we looking at?”

“The SD card from this little camera, sir.” She held out a small black rectangle, barely larger than a key fob. “This was positioned in the eaves just above the porch light. It’s sound- and motion-activated.” Levesque pressed rewind, and Green watched the jumbled images race backwards through time. Once it stopped, she pressed
Play.
The time display in the corner registered 22/05/14 19:05.

In the video, shafts of sunlight played off the slate in front of the house and lit the overarching boughs of pine and maple that bordered the path. Simultaneously, Rosten’s disembodied voice broke the silence. “This ought to do it,” he was saying, and a moment later, the back of his head came into the frame, followed by the rest of his chair as he wheeled himself out onto the porch. With deft flicks of his wrists, he turned his chair around and tilted his face up to look at the camera.

“I have put the game in motion. I have put out the invitation, using phone and Facebook. Whoever drives up that lane behind me, whoever parks and walks up this path, I will capture them. One way or another. Even if they search the place and find the camera inside, they won’t know about this one. My backup. My fail-safe. So that no matter what happens to me, this camera will be my witness. And my proof, Inspector Green.”

Green was jolted. Rosten stared hard into the camera, as if directly into Green’s eyes, for a full five seconds before wheeling himself slowly inside. After a brief delay, the picture flicked off and when the next scene appeared, the shadows were deeper and the sunlight more golden. The time display read 20:31 on the same evening. Almost dusk. The scene was motionless save the soft rustling of leaves, but the rumble of a car engine and the crunch of tires on gravel must have triggered the recording.

In the distance, the dark silhouette of a vehicle approached through the trees. Green leaned close, holding his breath as the vehicle drew closer. A minivan or an SUV, judging from the shape. Black, navy, charcoal? The deceptive gold of sunset played off the paint, obscuring its colour. The vehicle came to a cautious halt some distance from the cottage and the driver switched off the engine. Sat a moment in the car. Assessing threats? Plotting strategy?

Finally the door opened and the driver stepped out, dark and shapeless against the forest at dusk.
Too far away
, thought Green with frustration. He and the others were mesmerized as the person began up the walkway, his head bowed to concentrate on his footing in the deepening gloom. He carried what looked like a paper bag in one hand. Halfway up the path, he froze and turned slowly in place, scanning the woods. Searching for what? Green had heard nothing, seen nothing.

Could it have been the neighbour’s dogs barking?
he wondered.
Too far away to be captured by the recorder? Or the kayakers returning to their dock next door?
Or perhaps the stillness of the cottage itself, betraying the trap that lay in wait.

The figure stepped sideways out of the frame into the woods, leaving nothing but the empty path and the dark hulk of the vehicle in the drive. Green was about to speak when Levesque signalled. “There’s more, sir.”

At that moment, the recording picked up muffled footsteps and the swish of a sliding door, followed by Rosten’s startled voice. “Ah! An unorthodox approach, as always.”

The door slid shut, cutting off further sound, and five seconds later the picture clicked off. When it resumed at 21:47, the camera could distinguish nothing but flitting shadows in the dark, the rasp of heavy breathing, crunching gravel, and a distant engine starting. No headlights, no revving, just a quiet, furtive drift back down the lane before the camera clicked off.

“Careful bugger,” Cunningham said. “He didn’t even turn the headlights on.”

“Is there more?”

Cunningham shook his head. “Battery ran out. But this model lasts four hours, so nothing else happened within our time of death parameters.”

Green was still staring at the laptop, trying to recapture the images in his mind. “Looked like a woman,” he said.

Levesque frowned. “Why? You can’t even make out their clothes.”

“The walk. It was delicate.”

“But they were picking their way across the stones in poor light. It wasn’t a natural gait.”

Green had to acknowledge that. “It also looked like long, dark hair.”

“But it could have been a hood, sir. Or even a collar turned up against the chill.”

“What about the other camera? He bought two, and he mentioned another inside.”

Levesque shook her head. “No sign of that one. We’ve looked all over.”

Which means the visitor found it
, Green thought. Which means he knew Rosten was trying to set him up and foiled him yet again. Green swore silently. They were so close! He tried to match the image of the darkened figure against his list of suspects. Marilyn’s hair was white and Julia’s was short and blonde, but both Paige and Gordon had longish dark hair. Tom was red-haired and balding, but stooped over with his collar turned up, even he was a possible match. Green had no idea of the hairstyles of Erik Lazlo and Percy Mullenthorpe.

“So this is all we got,” he said. “Facebook! Marie Claire, how did we not know Rosten was on Facebook?”

“Belleville police handled that end of things, sir. But there was no account under his name, for sure.”

“Get Bob Gibbs on it. He’s a wizard. If Rosten was hiding a Facebook account, he’ll find it.” Green tapped the murky image on the screen. “Lyle, see what you can tease out of these images with your software downtown. The vehicle and the suspect. Let’s see if we can narrow things down.”

“The bag in his hand is an LCBO bag,” Cunningham said. “The sunlight hit it just right for a moment.”

The Scotch. So this visitor had come prepared, not to celebrate but to kill.

“And the vehicle looks like a Honda or Hyundai. They have similar hood logos.”

“Minivan or SUV?”

Cunningham shook his head, as usual reluctant to commit himself further, but Levesque had no such qualms. “I believe SUV, sir. It sits higher than a minivan.”

Green felt a strange mixture of thrill and dread; Marilyn owned a dark-green Honda SUV, which both she and Gordon drove. Rosten had set the trap, and like it or not, the noose was tightening.

Levesque put his thoughts into words. “One thing’s for sure, sir. You were right. Rosten
was
murdered, but it looks like he set it up himself.”

Bob Gibbs studied his page of jotted notes, trying to figure out his next line of inquiry. Phone calls and Web searches had filled in a lot of the blanks in Percy Mullenthorpe’s last thirty-five years, revealing an erratic work history of temporary, unskilled jobs. His most lucrative job, as a long-haul trucker, had ended when his licence was suspended just after Jackie’s death for driving while impaired. Gibbs wondered whether there was a connection. Mullenthorpe had not contacted the family or come to the funeral, but Jackie’s murder and the subsequent trial had been in the news for over a year. He’d been a drinker for years according to his ex-wife, but perhaps this had pushed him further down the slope.

After that, there had been work in the Maritimes as a general handyman and roofer before he had followed the economic boom out to Alberta. He’d worked in the oil sands, with brief jail stints for assault and causing a disturbance, before being laid off and moving to Calgary. On his latest arrest two years ago, the Calgary police listed him as of no fixed address.

The man had hit bottom.

But he did not appear to be dead. Homeless people moved from city to city and province to province in search of greater warmth, better social services, easier drugs, and less harassment. With his temper, he could easily have worn out his welcome in Alberta and come back east. The police in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa had no record of him, but he could have blended into the obscurity of a smaller town.

The more Gibbs learned about the man, however, the less likely he looked as a candidate for Rosten’s killer. Mullenthorpe was impulsive, disorganized, and probably brain-damaged from years of alcohol. Drunks were driven not by carefully planned revenge but by the when, where, and how of their next drink.

Nonetheless, because the inspector had assigned the task, he put out a routine inquiry. Then he glanced at his watch, shut down his computer, and rose to go. A handful of detectives were still bent over their computers, writing up their day, but Sue was waiting for him. They had a lead on a modest family farm near Navan that claimed to have a horse barn and paddock. They were going to grab an early dinner at the Elgin Street Diner up the street before heading out to Navan, hoping to avoid the worst of the rush hour.

Luck was not on their side in that regard, however, and they found themselves sitting on the eastbound Queensway, baking in Sue’s little Echo, whose air conditioning had long ago conceded defeat to the Ottawa summer. Sue had all the windows open, welcoming in the gas fumes and the rumble of idling engines. Sweat glued her hair to her forehead in a cloud of red frizz. Her head bobbed to the catchy rhythm of Belle Starr, her latest Celtic folk craze.

“I hope we get rain,” she shouted, peering out at the restless sky, which roiled with pink, white, and charcoal clouds. “It would get rid of this heat.”

“Don’t wish too hard ’til we get back home,” he said.

“Bring it on! Nothing is more beautiful than a summer storm in the country. The smell of damp earth, the warm drops on my face …”

A fork of lightning sliced the clouds ahead and he winced. Warm rain was one thing but thunderstorms quite another.

“I have high hopes for this place,” she said, undaunted. “The pictures look beautiful.”

“Except for that ‘Awaits your personal touch.’ Code for ‘Needs a lot of fixing up.’”

She laughed. “We can do that. Any place we can afford will need fixing up. But it will be a fun project for us while we …” She trailed off. Gibbs stole a glance at her and saw the flush on her freckled face. He knew she was afraid of childbirth. Afraid that her broken body and old scars would make it painful or even impossible. The doctors were encouraging but they had not lived through the pain she had.

He twined his fingers through hers. “Anything with you will be fun.”

They bantered languidly about dream kitchens and man caves as the steamy traffic lurched toward Orleans. By the time they approached the real estate office in Navan, the sky had darkened to billowing charcoal and lightning tongues lashed the fields.

“We’re early,” she said. “Let’s drive around to see if there are any private sales.”