“Where were you when this happened?”
Peel flicked the gum into his mouth. “Well—”
“Where?”
“In their condo.”
“That’s impossible,” Kennicott shot back. “I’ve watched all the videos from the lobby.”
“I’d go in through the basement. There was a door she’d leave open. Stick a brick in it.”
Peel and Torn together? Hard to imagine a more unlikely pair. “How often would you see her?” Kennicott asked. It was amazing the things people did with their lives.
“Every Tuesday morning,” Peel said. His voice flat now, resigned. “Eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock,” Kennicott echoed. He remembered the chart he’d done of Torn’s week. The perfect way to have an affair. “Just when the whole country knows Brace is in the studio,” he said.
Peel shot Kennicott a glance. He seemed to snap out of his sadness. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was angry.
“Kennicott, get your mind out of the gutter.”
Kennicott laughed. “Peel, you should talk. You’re the one who likes to brag about his conquests.”
“I wasn’t talking about Katherine,” Peel said. He was acting genuinely upset.
Kennicott had had enough of his charade. “Peel, give me a break. You sneaked in once a week to see her when Brace was on air . . .”
“Brace knew all about it. He encouraged it.”
“Encouraged it? Peel, you’re too much.”
Peel clawed another piece of gum out of his blister pack and jammed it into his mouth. “It’s not what you think. Katherine had a problem. Not many people knew about it. I was helping her.”
It was Kennicott’s turn to get angry. “Peel. You were having an affair with her and Brace found out, and now you’re trying to cover your—”
“Shut up, Kennicott,” Peel said. “We met at AA. I was her sponsor. For the first year, I only knew her first name. I didn’t have a clue who she was. Eventually she started to talk. That’s how I met Brace.”
Peel chewed his gum hard.
“Katherine just kept relapsing,” he said. “It was very bad. We thought a job might help her self-esteem. First step.” He spit his barely chewed gum into a snowbank.
Kennicott thought about how the little man had jiggled his ice-filled glass. How he’d drunk it all in one big gulp. Like a real drinker.
“How long have you been on the wagon?” he asked.
Peel glanced at him. “Five years. It was bad. I almost lost everything.”
Kennicott nodded.
“I don’t know anything about how she ended up dead. But you want to put me on the stand to bury Katherine a second time, go right ahead.” He zipped up his jacket, making a cool, swishing sound. “It will be on your conscience, not mine.” Peel yanked open the heavy door and disappeared into the warm chalet.
A moment later the door closed with a loud clank. Kennicott looked across the darkened millionaires’ parking lot and knew it was going to be a long, cold walk back to his car.
T
he worst thing about the drive out of Toronto was the endless traffic. Here it was just past 11:30 and you’d think rush hour would be over. Especially since he was headed out of town. Instead, Ari Greene was sitting in a traffic jam on the Don Valley Parkway, heading northeast out of the city. No wonder the suburbanites who had to drive this every day referred to it as the Don Valley Parking Lot.
Forty minutes later, when he finally got to the end of the highway and turned onto a two-lane country road, everything changed. The cars thinned out, and unlike in the city, where there was only a hint of winter, the woods were filled with snow. For the next two hours, as he drove north, then east, then north again, the landscape grew even whiter. But the roads were in pristine condition. In Toronto a few inches of snow could linger on side streets for days, but up north they took good care of their roads.
The only delay was a bad patch of construction on the highway just before he got to his destination. So it was almost three o’clock when he pulled into the parking lot of the Hardscrabble Café. Huge mounds of snow were piled up on all sides, somehow making the lot feel like an enclosed bunker.
Inside, Greene smelled the now-familiar scent of fresh-baked bread. He’d read that smell is the only fully formed sense we have when we’re born, and one of the last senses to go before we die. Often
he asked witnesses, trying to recall an event, if they could remember the smell of a place. He found that, like a song on a car radio when something unusual happens, a scent could fix a point in time in a witness’s mind. It was surprisingly effective.
Throughout his long drive north Greene had been preoccupied with the phone call he’d gotten from Kennicott about McGill’s fingerprints on Brace’s million-dollar contract offer from Howard Peel.
Greene replayed in his mind his first meeting with McGill at her café back in December. He remembered how he’d watched her wipe down the tables. How surprised she was to see he was still there. How she reacted when he called her Mrs. Brace and identified himself.
“Shit,” she’d said. The word seemed so out of place from this proper, highly disciplined woman. She’d stopped and looked him straight in the eye. “I guess I knew someone would show up sooner or later.”
“I didn’t want to talk to you in front of your customers, but we couldn’t find a phone number for you,” he’d said, and she’d put her hand on his shoulder: “I don’t have a phone, Detective Greene.”
“What if someone needs to reach you?” Greene had asked.
With an easy confidence McGill replied, “You can always send me a letter, Detective. It takes just two days from Toronto.”
She’d smiled a warm smile and laughed a bit more. “You get stuck in that construction on the highway?” she’d asked.
“For half an hour,” he’d told her, and she’d shaken her head and said, “It’s been two years. They promised us it would take nine months. Doesn’t help business, I can tell you that.”
“I just have some questions for you,” Greene had said, and with a nod McGill pulled out a chair and sat down. She reached into her apron and extracted a pack of cigarettes, crinkling the box.
Sarah McGill swears and she smokes, he’d thought. There was something surprisingly charming about it.
McGill pulled the plastic off the cigarette pack, opened the lid, and hit the bottom corner, trying to get a cigarette out. It wouldn’t come. She put the pack down.
“Everyone up here smokes, Detective. I began a few months ago. Pretty strange, don’t you think, for a sixty-year-old woman to start smoking for the first time in her life.”
“Doesn’t look like you’re very good at it,” he said, pointing to the pack.
McGill grinned. She held up her left hand. “Lost the finger when I was a kid. My dad took me on a tour of the mine and I poked around where I wasn’t supposed to. I was too embarrassed as a teenager to hold a cigarette, so I was probably the only kid in town who didn’t smoke.” She shrugged and picked up the pack again. “I’ll quit soon. What do you need to know?”
They spoke for about an hour. The story seemed pretty straightforward. When Brace and McGill’s oldest child, Kevin junior, was two-and-a-half years old, he was diagnosed with severe autism. For years they struggled as their son descended into his own silent world. When puberty hit, he became big and violent. By this time their daughters Amanda and Beatrice were eight and six years old, and it was no longer safe to have him at home. Children’s Aid took him into care. The stress of it all soon ended their marriage. Brace moved in with Katherine Torn, and McGill decided to come to Haliburton.
“It’s a funny thing, the north,” she’d said. “If you grew up here, it gets under your skin. The schools were much better in the city, so the girls stayed with Kevin for a few years. It was a hard time, but it was the right decision. Kevin was a good father. And he always paid his alimony, as they used to call it back then. I bought this café and have been running it ever since.”
“And Kevin junior?”
She just shrugged her shoulders, the sadness heavy on her. “It’s so hard. He’s such a gentle soul now. I try to see him once a week. Take him out for dinner.”
“And your girls are doing well?”
She burst into a grin. “Both pregnant. Lucky me.” She yawned. “It’s a long day, Detective. I start making bread at five. Every day for the last twenty years.”
Greene had driven home impressed with McGill’s grace and fortitude.
Today the café was even less crowded than the last time Greene was here. He spotted a table in the far corner and made his way through the customers, mostly men wearing thick sweaters and heavy boots. The snowmobilers had their black, one-piece suits on, the tops unzipped and rolled down to their waists.
“Sorry to keep yous waitin’,” Charlene, the waitress who’d served Greene before, said. “Our fresh special today is spaghetti and meatballs, with a sauce made from our own tomatoes.”
Greene was hungry. He’d driven straight through after getting Kennicott’s call. “Sounds good. How do you get your own tomatoes this time of year?”
The waitress looked at Greene over her little notepad. “Ms. McGill studied botany. Bottles them fresh in the fall.”
Greene ate his meal slowly and waited patiently for the restaurant to clear out. The men looked much like those who’d been there the last time. Burly. Casual. Confident. And they were all white. Living in Toronto, Greene wasn’t used to being in a restaurant where there were only Caucasians.
Both times he’d walked into the café, there’d been a slight lull in the conversation. Small towns. An outsider really had nowhere to hide.
It was almost four o’clock when McGill finally emerged from the kitchen and joked with the last of the patrons.
“We’re going to miss your food on Monday,” a big man said as he rose from his table. Greene remembered the gregarious fellow from the last time he’d been here. “Wish you’d stay open,” he said, sounding like a petulant child who didn’t want to go to bed well past his bedtime.
“Jared, I deserve one day off a week,” she said as she shooed him out the door.
“You must like my food, Detective, to drive all the way up here just for lunch,” McGill said as she took a seat at his table after the last customer had gone. This time she sat beside him. She looked tired but relaxed. A dish towel lay casually on her left shoulder. Greene noticed that her hands were empty.
“The food’s well worth the drive, Ms. McGill,” Greene said. “What happened to the cigarettes?”
“Kicked the habit. Not many sixty-year-olds can say that. The damn things were ruining my taste buds.”
“And stunting your growth.”
She laughed her good, hearty chuckle. Greene waited until she stopped. “We found fingerprints of yours on something in Brace’s apartment,” he said, watching closely for her reaction.
McGill turned her head and looked squarely at Greene. Her eyes widened.
“They were in a contract,” Greene explained. “Kevin was offered a job at another radio station. For a lot of money. Can I assume you know about this?”
McGill seemed to relax. She spread her hands out in front of her, like a cat comfortably stretching, stifling another yawn.
“I knew about the contract, Detective,” she said. “I told you before, Kevin always paid support. It’s a miracle, because he’s useless with money, always has been.”
“He showed the contract to you?”
Her smile widened. “Kevin never signs anything important unless I see it. I’m the businessperson in the family.”
“When did he show it to you?”
“He would have sent it to me.”
“Sent it?” Greene was confused.
“Mailed it, of course. Two days for a package to come from Toronto, one day if it’s sent express.”
“That’s right. No phone. And I assume no fax machine.”
McGill smiled and started to sing. “‘No phone, no pool, no pets, I ain’t got no cigarettes . . .’ You old enough to remember that song, ‘King of the Road’?”
“Roger Miller,” Greene said. “My mother loved it.”
McGill kept singing. “‘Short but not too big around.’ Sounds like me, Detective.” She burst out laughing. “Kevin and I, we’re both Luddites. No credit cards. No cell phones. It took me years before I even put a dishwasher in the café.”
She turned her eyes from him to the uncleared dishes on his table. Greene saw her hand go to the towel over her shoulder.
“Do you remember when he mailed the contract up to you?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “The first of every month he sends me my monthly check and anything else he wants me to read or help him with. I would have got it in early December and mailed it back the next day.” She began to rise up from her chair. The towel was in her hand now. “I don’t want to be rude, Detective, but I still have a lot of cleaning up to do.”
“One last question,” Greene asked as he stood up. He’d left a very good tip under the far side of his plate. “What’d you tell him about the contract?”
She laughed. Her hearty chuckle reverberated around the empty room. “Detective, I might be old-fashioned, but I’m not an idiot. I told him, ‘Sign the damn thing, just skip the limo so you don’t get fat.’”
A
lbert Fernandez paced back and forth in his office, which meant he took two steps, turned, and took two steps back in the other direction. It was absurd. Here he was working on the biggest case in the country and his office was no bigger than a prison cell. Smaller, probably, he thought, when you consider all the space the five evidence boxes took up, dominating the north wall.
He stopped and stared at the boxes. Each was filled with thirty or forty files. He’d handwritten the labels to each and handwritten an index for every box.
It was not that Fernandez was afraid of computers. He was very good with them. But when it came down to the final preparation of a case, he had to touch every document, organize every file, and sweat every detail by hand. That way, when he got to court, he knew exactly where everything was.
He went back to his desk, where a simple black binder sat alone. A label identified it as
TRIAL BINDER
—
BRACE
. He opened it to the first page. He’d written the heading “Key Facts,” underlined it, and listed them: