Authors: Scott Thornley
Neatly stacked beside her was dirty clothing. “Soiled—feces and urine, some blood,” one of the women on the forensics team offered. Folded the way it would be if someone were packing for a long trip—underwear, socks, T-shirts, jeans, a cotton dress, a light sweater. Beyond the clothes was a small carry-on bag and a suitcase. Next to the head was a coil of rope with something stuffed in the middle.
“That’s a gag. There’s blood on it with an incisor stuck to it. Looks like it wasn’t knocked out—just rotted out while the gag was on.” The team leader’s voice was flat.
Aziz adjusted her mask and goggles. “She must have been kept in this house for a while.”
The jackhammer operator was perched on his generator. “Oh yeah,” he said, “she was here for a while.” He went over to the door and lifted it, pivoting it so they could see the other side. The days and weeks were scratched into the wood, the seventh day crossing over the
previous six. “She made it to 101. If she started keeping score on a Monday, her last day was Thursday.” MacNeice looked down to the right of her hip, where a green garbage bag was stuffed between her and the wall of the pit.
“That’s garbage, sir. Appears to be biscuit wrappers and empty cereal boxes.”
“He wanted her alive but not very,” Williams said wryly.
“She was being punished,” MacNeice said. “What’s that under her head?”
“Looks like a book in bubble wrap, sir,” one of the women said.
“After we lifted off the door, we wanted you to see it before we disturbed anything further,” the team leader said.
MacNeice nodded and put on his latex gloves. “Lift the book out for me.”
The woman stepped carefully into the pit and gently raised the skull, trying not to disturb the matted hair or stained veil. She retrieved the book, and as she let the head down, they heard the sound of something clicking or snapping. In the quiet of the basement, the noise was sickeningly loud. Aziz wasn’t the only one who winced.
MacNeice took the package from her. Removing the bubble wrap, he studied the cover. “It’s a diary.” MacNeice opened the book and read aloud: “This will be my wife’s last will and testimony.” It was dated 07 08 01 and signed by David Nicholson. Below, in a jagged scrawl was another signature: “Jennifer Nicholson.”
The book sat in an evidence bag on the floor between Aziz’s feet as they drove back to Division. He noticed her glancing down at it from time to time, though she said nothing. When he was
parking, she spoke for the first time. “He deserved to die.” She opened the door and got out. MacNeice leaned over and picked up the book.
As he climbed the stairs behind her, he said, “What amazes me is that someone so brutal could also be a great father.”
“But, it happened … it happens,” Aziz said. “Or at least that was the image he fought to preserve.”
MacNeice had a thought that made his skin crawl. “Dylan was also his prisoner—he just never knew it.”
“How so?” She was taking off her coat, draping it over the cubicle wall.
“Dylan and his mother both did whatever David Nicholson wanted them to do. She was forced to obey. Dylan complied out of love and affection. Doesn’t it seem strange now to think how many people said that Nicholson was Dylan’s best friend, that they were inseparable, and that a father who didn’t care about sport suddenly became an assistant coach on the basketball team so he could support and encourage his son? Now I have to think it was all about control.” He put his coat beside hers. “Double espresso?”
She nodded, smiling at him for the first time since the basement.
When he returned with the coffee, Aziz said, “Ryan has some news—it’s not good.”
Ryan was sitting at his computer station, his feet up on the casters of his task chair, his hands on its leather arms. “Sir, Constable Szabo died this afternoon. The head injury triggered a cerebral hemorrhage late last night.”
Aziz held the cup to her lips with both hands as her eyes welled up. “That young man did
not
deserve to die.”
MacNeice put his latex gloves on, removed the diary from the evidence bag and bubble wrap, and sat down to examine it.
The handwriting was precise—consistently within the lines—and smaller than he expected from the tall man he’d seen in the barbecue photograph. The neat entries were dated to the minute, leaving MacNeice with the impression that Nicholson knew it would be discovered eventually and that he wanted people to be impressed that it was neat—that he was neat.
MacNeice began at the beginning:
August 6, 2001. 4:37 p.m. J wants to know why we’re here. It’s disingenuous of course—she knows exactly why, so I ignore the question. Have managed to establish 7:00 p.m. as my pick-up time for Dylan at Daycare—splendid! This means I can continue to arrive here between 4:30 and 4:40 every day. I neither need nor want more.
4:48 p.m. She wants to go home. Promises she’ll behave. I tell her this IS her home, and that I will come once a day. She will remain tied to the bed until I arrive, and while I’m here, she will be allowed to move around the house until her lessons begin. “F*** you!” she says. I tell J that every time she swears—a nasty habit that I’m determined will not infect my son—she will lose food privileges for the day. J screams, “F*** you!” I introduce her to a dirty dishcloth that was here when I took possession of the house. Rolled up, it makes the perfect gag. Today’s lesson was postponed due to bad behaviour.
August 7, 2001. 9:40 p.m. Daycare closed early for cleanup, so I had to miss today. Dundurn
Missing Persons called me and her parents to say there was no record of Jennifer Grant returning by air, rail or bus. Of course they don’t know she came back by car. That part was so easy. J wants to begin teaching next month—what a laugh! J wants to be with her son, begs to be with Dylan. Why? “I love my son, I’ll do anything you say; just let me be with him.” I tell her D is not her son anymore and he will grow up knowing his mother deserted him. Tears now … oh my, such tears. “When a woman weeps, she is setting traps with her tears.” Dionysius Cato.
August 8, 2001, 4:15 p.m. On the bright side, J understands now that I’m serious. I have removed the gag for the visit. J eats Cheerios from the box. She smells like excrement—for good reason. She has defecated in bed, soiling everything, and has to be punished. We move downstairs for the lessons—permanently, I think, as the stench above is too much for me. She’ll sleep and spend her day in the bed until I come—but I will limit her liquid intake to eight ounces of water a day. Dry food means, hopefully, a dry bed. What a pig she is. How did we ever, ever, ever, find ourselves together?
4:42 p.m. J fondles her breasts, groans, a come-on from a bad actor. I laugh. J cries. AGAIN! I tell her she’s pathetic and I mean it. Who would want this woman if they could see her now? Begging, pleading … If I were in her shoes, I’d like to think I’d be stoic and resigned to my fate. Not her. She’s still squirming, conniving, looking for a way out. Right now, she thinks I don’t notice, but she’s studying the basement windows to see if I’ve forgotten something. I haven’t.
5:00 p.m. Our lesson is a success I think. Yes, she continues to beg me to let her go, but as soon
as I reach for the dirty dishcloth, she sits silently, whimpering in a sweet but pathetic way. I read Auden and James. She listens—and I hope learns—from the beauty of the language.
5:45 p.m. Before I leave, J cleans up—well, she scrapes the bed with a spatula and puts the filth in a garbage bag. She’s quite domesticated now, and only two days have passed. J has so much more to learn—I’m quite excited about this. I tell her so, and say that I’ve decided to call this the Great Reform Program. J sees neither the humour nor the gravity in that statement. But she will.
5:58 p.m. Have determined to hose J down every Friday—must do for my own sake. Pity, there’s no hot water. Will make do. Have taken to wearing rubber gloves.
MacNeice stopped reading, put the book down and slowly peeled off the gloves. His breathing was shallow and his heart was racing. He couldn’t go on—at least not right away—and he wouldn’t except for the chance the diary would provide clues about the person who wrapped Nicholson up in duct tape with a grenade under his chin.
Catching the look of despair on his face, Aziz said, “It’s that bad?”
“Worse.” He rubbed his face and eyes hard.
“Well, I’ve got something of interest in that respect: an email from a Constable Jeremy Hopewell, concerning interviews he’s doing on Tisdale. Something was troubling him and, after he got home from his shift, he reread his notes of an interview he did with a woman across the street from the Nicholsons.
“Her name is Grace Smylski, and it turns out that her son, Tom, is the same age as Dylan.
They’ve been friends since grade one and Tom’s also on the Mercy basketball team. About a month or so after Dylan’s mother disappeared, a man showed up at the Nicholsons’. There was a loud confrontation on the front porch, and the stranger shoved Dylan’s father against the wall.
“Grace told the constable that she couldn’t see what happened next, because of the tree in front, but when she ran across the street, David Nicholson was lying on the porch with a bloody nose and the man was driving away.”
“Ask Hopewell to confirm that she’s at home and get him to meet you there in a half-hour,” MacNeice said. “Let’s see if she can describe the man or recall the kind of vehicle he was driving.” He took a sheet from his pad and wrote, “Jennifer Grant’s body found, basement of Ryder Road.” He taped it next to Nicholson’s photo, then, feeling sickened by the proximity, he moved the note two inches to the right.
Williams and Vertesi got back as Aziz was heading out.
“Get this,” Williams said. “Inside the suitcase there was a
Star Wars
Jedi Knight toy still in the box. Guess Dave didn’t think Dylan would appreciate having it.”
“Which one of you has the skin to read something grim?” MacNeice pointed to the diary.
Vertesi shrugged, and Williams looked over at the whiteboard.
“I won’t lie about how sick it is,” MacNeice said. “I want it skimmed—don’t get hooked. Remember the man who wrote this is still being picked up by crows, seagulls and pigeons.”
“I’ll do it,” Williams said.
Vertesi said, “I’m in too. If you need a breather, I mean.”
“I’m not looking for the details of what was done to Jennifer Grant—that much we’ve already discovered,” MacNeice said. “I want anything that would point us toward Nicholson’s killer—and Szabo’s. Again, the man was a monster—don’t let him in your head. Understood?”
“Yeah, I’m cool.”
“Sure, me too … I guess.”
Byrne’s boat was getting the star treatment at Mount Hope. Surrounded by computers on folding tables and microscopes on rolling cabinets, the runabout was suspended by chains a few feet off the ground. There were four researchers on site and Nathan Ho said two more were down at the Barton Street facility doing DNA. “Basically, gene matching.”
He suggested MacNeice look at something inside the boat and took the controls of an overhead crane that tilted the boat toward them. Large floodlights were positioned to shine on the aluminum interior—the effect, at first, was blinding.
“See here, sir …” Ho used a metal pointer to indicate an elliptical dent in the hull’s surface. “This blow isn’t typical of the damage caused by running a boat over rocks; this was caused by something heavy dropped inside the boat. It’s recent, within the last four months. It’s here we found hair—not blond, but black. And not female … This is male hair.”
He took MacNeice over to one of the microscopes where the hair, seen through the lens, appeared to be a half-inch thick. “It’s oval in section—Caucasian hair. It was stuck in place by the blood that had pooled around it and dried like cement. The blood washed away when the boat was cleaned, but this hair held fast. Whoever cleaned the boat didn’t notice.”
“So what caused the dent?”
“Not the anchor—it has the wrong profile. This was something heavy, like a sledgehammer.”
Then Ho showed MacNeice another strand the team had found, a grey line that snaked across the lens.
“Woman’s pubic hair.” Ho clicked twice on the keyboard. “Now look,” he said.
There were two lines snaking side by side. “Two hairs from the same woman, as best we can tell. One is from this boat and the other is from the body you brought out of the bay.”
“A match?”
“We’re waiting on the DNA, but yes, a dead match.”
Finally, Ho offered MacNeice the view through a large illuminated magnifying glass. A small turquoise stone was centred on a black felt pad. It was conical on one side and facet cut on the other. “Pointy end goes in a ring or an earring or maybe a brooch.”
“Interesting,” MacNeice said. “The young woman didn’t have rings or pierced ears, and there was no evidence of any piercings on her body.”
“Maybe it’s not related then? I don’t know.” He turned the light off in the magnifying glass. The stone sat—a lonely turqouise speck in the middle of a black sea.
Pulling away from the lab, MacNeice called Richardson.
“He’s on the table now, Mac. There’s not much I can tell you at the moment,” Richardson said. He could hear suction hoses going, and Junior humming something in the background.
“Mary, is he wearing an earring?” MacNeice asked as he merged with the traffic heading back to Dundurn.
“Yes, left ear … a modest affair.” Her voice was almost a whisper, suggesting she had the phone propped between chin and shoulder. “Small turquoise stone … nicely set in a thick silver hoop … and, let me see,” he could hear the ruffling of her lab coat, Junior still humming over the gagging of the suction hose, “diameter, slightly less than an inch, thickness, shy of three-sixteenths—does that suggest anything?”
“And the other ear?”
More rustling, sounds of exertion. “No stone, just a flattened ring. Likely happened when his skull was crushed.”
He thanked her and asked if she’d taken delivery of the body of a woman who’d been dead for more than a decade. “She was buried under concrete in a basement.”
“Arriving shortly. We’ve got another half-hour or so of sucking this young man’s insides out, but there’s plenty of room here, so we won’t turn her away.”