The Ambitious City (10 page)

She fell back into her chair as if she’d been struck. She covered her mouth with her hands and her eyes began to fill with tears. “No, that can’t be. She left just a few hours ago to go shopping with her mom.”

“She was waiting for her mother when she was killed, by the stairs at the foot of the mountain.”

“Was it an accident?” She stood up again.

“No, she was murdered.”

Wendy tugged at her sweatshirt and swayed a little where she stood. Her mouth opened but whatever sounds she wanted to release stayed caught somewhere deep in her stomach. After a long moment, during which he could see her working hard to control her breathing and her fear, she spoke, her voice soft, almost distant.

“But … who would do that? I mean, everyone loves Ghosh.” Wendy wiped the tears from her eyes. “We all call her Ghosh, you know, like ‘oh, my gosh.’ She’s the best friend I’ve ever had. We were going home next weekend to spend a few days with my folks in Fonthill.”

“Was she seeing anyone that you know of—a boyfriend?”

“No. With this course, there’s seriously no time for boys.” She went into the kitchen and grabbed the roll of paper towels. She was now weeping openly, tears spilling down her face. She blew her nose hard—he was impressed and imagined it was a hangover from her country childhood, where she hadn’t been taught to be ladylike. She sagged into the chair, and MacNeice waited till she had calmed a little.

“Do you know anything about her parents or whether she had any other family here?” He had his notebook open and looked down at it rather than at her.

“She didn’t have any family other than her mom and her stepdad. I know she lost her father and a younger brother in Bangladesh—they were blown up in a market when she was a girl.” A small pile of crumpled paper towels was growing in her lap.

“And her stepfather?”

“She got on well with him, but I never met him.”

“How did she support herself in nursing school?”

“Like we all do, through the nursing program itself. We’re paid to work in the hospital, so our training is very much hands-on.”

“Was there anyone at the hospital, a man perhaps, that Taaraa may have fought with or had some form of relationship with?”

“Not that I know of. I mean, we were on the same shifts but in totally different wards. They move us around, you know. Right now I’m in Pediatrics and Ghosh is in Fractures.”

“So at the end of your shift you would meet up for coffee or dinner?”

“Most always, sure.”

“And when you didn’t, where did Taaraa go?”

“Well, she didn’t like going home for dinner, but she would meet her mom downtown.”

“Why didn’t she like having dinner at home?”

“She loved Canadian food. Give that girl a burger and she’d just light up … That’s why coming home to Fonthill with me was such a blast for her. She’d get roast chicken or beef, apple pie, peach cobbler—she was in heaven.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about her, Wendy?”

“No, not at the moment anyways. Like, I feel pretty shaken—” The second syllable of “shaken” went up heartbreakingly, half an octave. “I’ve gotta call my mom … and, I guess, our supervisor.”

“Don’t worry about informing the hospital; we’ve taken care of it. Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah … I guess so … I mean, I don’t know what to do now.”

“Don’t do anything; just let it in. Before I go, I need to see Taaraa’s room. Do you want to show it to me or just point me in the direction?”

“Her room is behind me. Mine’s further down, closer to the bathroom. Ghosh’s room isn’t as nice as mine but she wouldn’t take the better room, even though she found the apartment.”

Ghosh’s room was simple but elegant: more photos of the parliament building, a saffron-coloured silk hanging stapled to the ceiling and running along above the bed before cascading down behind the headboard. On the dresser was a framed family portrait of her as a young girl, with her mother and her long-dead father and brother.

Her clothes were neatly tucked away in her dresser—no secrets there. Nor was there anything of interest in the closet. He found nothing under the mattress or under the bed, and only a neatly folded indigo cotton nightshirt under her pillow. He took away the laptop computer. He didn’t know the password, but with Ryan on board, he was certain that wouldn’t be a problem.

Returning to the living room, he said, “Thank you, Wendy. There’ll be a forensics team here later to go over her room more thoroughly, and you have my card if anything else occurs to you.”

He went to the door. On the other side he stood there for a moment, then left once he heard the deadbolt slide shut.

A
FTER DROPPING OFF
the computer with Ryan, MacNeice drove home along Main Street, longing for the comfort of his stone cottage on the hill and happy as always that some long-ago traffic engineer had set the lights to turn green just before he had to brake—as long as he maintained thirty-five miles per hour. He slipped Miles Davis into the Chevy’s CD player and glanced at the clock—9:48 p.m. He hadn’t eaten since lunch but had no desire for food. This was a double-grappa day.

He was pulling up to the cottage when his cellphone rang. “MacNeice,” he answered as he got wearily out of the car.

“It’s me, boss. The stepfather’s home,” Vertesi said.

“I’ll be right down.”

“No need. I already went to see him. He’s not our man.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He’s in a wheelchair. He broke his back years ago, shortly after he came to Canada.”

“But he worked at the steel company.”

“He sat in a booth above the coiler pit for six years, doing computer programming for the inventory coming down the line.”

MacNeice was happy to rule him out as a suspect. Vertesi said he was as grief-stricken as the mother and, to make matters worse, he hadn’t got the job in Oakville because, the interviewer said, they couldn’t take the time to train him on a new computer program. “He told me they actually said to him that they needed someone—and this is a quote, apparently—to hit the ground running.”

“God, that was subtle,” MacNeice said. “Anything else?”

“Dundurn General’s in shock—seems like Ms. Ghosh was very popular there. I checked with Ryan, and they’re pulling the video files together for him on DVDs and they’ve got headshots of everyone who works there, even the part-timers. They’re really shocked—she was a star.”

“I’m not surprised. Was Ryan able to open her computer?”

“Oh yeah, in about five minutes. He wanted you to know that she never activated email on it. Sounds weird to me, but there was no email account.”

“That’s interesting. Stop by her parents’ house tomorrow and ask for any recent snapshots of her. Promise them they’ll be returned within the day.”

“Right, boss.”

“I’ll see you in the morning.” He put the cellphone back in his jacket pocket.

MacNeice opened the cottage door, stepped inside and rested the tips of his fingers for a moment on the beautiful rump of a nude in a framed photograph. He smiled wearily, put his keys on the table below the photo and went into the kitchen for the grappa. The barrel glass would hold two shots; he poured, then lifted his glass and let the liquid slide down his throat. Looking out the window, he could see only flickering specks of light from Secord, down below. He pulled the drapes and went into the bedroom to change.

He put his jacket over the doorknob and, leaning on the low dresser that ran along the wall, kicked off his shoes without undoing the laces.

MacNeice considered having another grappa. Instead he made his way into the kitchen and put the bottle back in the cabinet. Turning to the sink, he saw his reflection in the window. “
Basta cosi
,” he said to himself. He ran water into the glass, turned out the kitchen and living room lights and went into the bedroom feeling like a condemned man.

It was a little over four years since Kate had died, and while the dreams remained as bone-grinding as ever, they were coming randomly rather than every other night. He sped through his routine—floss, brush, wash the day from his face—before peeing out as much fluid as possible so that, if a dreamless sleep should come, he wouldn’t have to wake up again till morning. He closed the drapes, undressed, grabbed his ancient T-shirt from under the pillow and put it on.

He glanced at the clock radio—10:51 p.m.—and climbed into his side of the bed. The grappa had done the trick: as his body sank into the warmth, he could feel the tension seeping silently out of him and into the mattress. His eyes closed easily. “Ghosh,” he whispered. And slowly the day faded and he was asleep.

M
AC
N
EICE ARRIVED AT
Division to find another whiteboard already in the cubicle, with Taaraa Ghosh’s name at the top in red. He greeted Ryan and the two detectives, then said, “I called Wendy Little this morning to ask her about the computer. Apparently Ghosh had everything on her BlackBerry. She thought doing emails on her computer was, as Wendy called it, a ‘time suck.’ She never activated it, apparently because Ms. Ghosh was entirely focused on nursing.”

“Now, that’s dedication,” Williams said.

Dropping his jacket over the chair, MacNeice noticed her photo album with its puffed fake leather cover. Looking through the pages, he could see that they were a happy family who loved to travel around southern Ontario. There were several photos where both women had their arms around the smiling man in the wheelchair. Visiting Niagara Falls, a peach orchard, African Lion Safari, the CN Tower—each image seemed to exude a giddiness at being alive. He put the album on the filing cabinet and sat down at his desk.

He opened the police and forensics report. No knife found—
not a good sign
, he thought—two partial prints from a running shoe or hiking boot discovered near her footprints and made at roughly the same time. Some further partial footprints, this time with blood, leading to the edge of the road, where they stopped. “He took his shoes off,” MacNeice said quietly. His upper body would have been the most bloodied, but he hadn’t panicked. “Show me an aerial of the site.”

Ryan pulled up the image on his computer. “Here you go, sir.” He slid out of the way.

MacNeice studied the screen and then the outputs of the partial footprints that stopped at the road. “Blow up this section.” He pointed to the middle left of the screen. With two clicks the image grew, and MacNeice looked closer. After several seconds he said, “I think we’ve found his way out.” He reached over to where the bloody shoeprint ended and drew his finger across the road to the last house. He tapped the driveway pictured on the screen. “That’s where he parked. She was looking up the stairs to the top; he parked on her blind side, arriving before her.”

“I checked that house last night,” Vertesi said. “It’s for sale and empty. There’s a paved driveway but it’s all cracking, with grass and weeds coming through the concrete.”

“How would he know she was going to meet her mother?” Williams asked.

“Either it was random—which I don’t believe—or he knew it was her routine to meet her mother there,” MacNeice said. “She left the apartment … Zoom out on the aerial.” Ryan pulled the image back. “There, from Cannon to where Wentworth turns up the mountain. My guess—he was waiting across the street from her apartment, parked, until she came out of the house. When she did and headed south on Wentworth, he drove to that driveway and waited for her.”

“There were some oil stains; it’s possible they were fresh. I’ll have them checked out.”

“Find out whether they’re oil from a car or a truck. Then look around the west side of 94 Wentworth for any similar stains.” He looked again at the report; Forensics estimated the shoe size to be ten and a half to eleven. He turned the page to the fingerprints: several partials and dozens of full-on prints. They had eliminated the older prints, and after examining the fresh ones, they had determined that most were from the teenagers who had gathered there to look at the body. Ghosh’s prints were found on the railing where she had jumped, but there were no fresh prints nearby. “He wears gloves. Who wears gloves in the summertime?” MacNeice said to himself.

“Boss, you’ll want to see this. Ryan’s just opened a link.” Vertesi moved aside from the screen. “It’s not good.”

MacNeice and Williams both turned towards the screen. There, in colour, was a close-up of the dead girl, taken not by one of the teenagers standing on the stairs, as MacNeice had feared, but by someone standing right over her. “What is this?”

“It’s the Internet, sir,” Vertesi said.

“Where did it come from?” MacNeice asked.

Ryan looked up at MacNeice. “Anyone with a cellphone could push that out into the world. Judging by the image quality, it’s either a BlackBerry or an iPhone.”

“Hers. He took the shot while she was face up, then flipped her face down,” MacNeice said, going back to his desk.

“How fast can we get that off the Web?” Williams asked.

“No can do—it’s out there. Even if the service providers take it down, it’s gone viral. I think there must be at least a million kids in China gawking at this image right now. Sorry.”

“This is a seriously sick fuck,” Vertesi said.

MacNeice put down the forensics file. “Start marking up that
whiteboard. I’m at the coroner’s. I’ll call the Deputy Chief about the killing and let him know it’s on the Web so he’s ready when CNN calls. Start the interviews at the hospital—every doctor, orderly, nurse and administrator who had contact with Taaraa Ghosh.”

“Will do,” Vertesi called after MacNeice, who had already left the cubicle.

M
AC
N
EICE WAS SEETHING
. The damage caused by nasty or upsetting images and videos released onto the Web had become all too common around the world, committed by a sneering class of bullies who used the shelter of the Internet’s anonymity to terrorize and humiliate people for their own savage amusement. For MacNeice, however, the image of a ripped-open woman defied and transcended even that level of callousness. He inhaled deeply as it occurred to him again—with this level of planning and display, what happened at the mountain stairs was probably just the beginning.