The Ambitious City (8 page)

Ryan said, “Thank you, Detective, but it wasn’t that hard, due to the fact that the military database security system is massively out of date.”

“Meaning you broke through their firewall?”

“More like I was rooting around in the files they store in the basement … But yes, I broke in.”

“Let’s keep that down low.”

“Yes, sir. In a minute I should be able to give you a photograph of what he looked like—I mean, with a face.”

Williams wiped
No-Face
from the board and wrote
Gary Robert Hughes
below the image. Looking at Bermuda Shorts, he asked,
“Can you disappear the bullet hole in this guy’s forehead?”

“Easy.”

The phone rang five times before it was picked up. “Hi—sorry, I was out in the yard—who’s calling?” The woman was out of breath.

“Who am I speaking to, please?” MacNeice asked. His pen was poised above a clean page in his notebook.

“Sue-Ellen Hughes. Can I help you?”

“Ms. Hughes, I’m Detective Superintendent MacNeice of the Dundurn Police Department.”

“Dundurn … You mean, up in Canada?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Can you tell me your relationship to Gary Robert Hughes?”

MacNeice could hear the woman take a deep breath and then there was silence, but for the sounds of kids playing in the background.

“Ms. Hughes?”

“Yes, yes, I’m here. Gary’s my husband.” He heard her take another deep breath. “What kind of detective are you?”

“A homicide detective, Ms. Hughes. We’re interested in the whereabouts of Gary Hughes, as we believe he may have been a witness to a homicide here.”

“I don’t understand. By ‘here,’ you mean up in Canada?”

“In Dundurn, yes.”

“But why would Gary be in Canada?”

“When did you last see your husband?”

He could hear that she had begun to weep. MacNeice waited patiently. Close to the phone, a child asked, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” She told the child she had something stuck in her eye and to please go back outside, that Mommy was okay. Then she was finally able to say, “Gary left two years ago, almost to the day. He
was going to meet someone about a job, and he never came home.”

“Do you know where the meeting was?”

“Not far from here—a bar. I don’t know what it was about. Detective, please tell me what’s going on.”

“You have a family?”

“Yes … Yes, we have three kids, four, seven and nine. The youngest and oldest are boys, and Jenny’s the seven-year-old.”

“What did Sergeant Hughes do for a living after he left the service?”

“Not much. Gary chased all kinds of leads trying to get a steady job.”

“He found it difficult to adjust, or to find work?”

“Both. The army trained him, turned him into a weapon—he was a double black belt in two martial arts—but when he was discharged, they didn’t help him with any career advice … And what good is a killer out of the army?”

“Did he have friends in Tonawanda?”

“Only army buddies. He came here to get trained as a carpenter, and then the economy blew apart—not just for us, but for the guys he was going into construction with. It all just faded away.”

“Would they get together at your house?”

“No, only at Old Soldiers. It’s a roadhouse on the outskirts of Tonawanda. Gary never drank much in the army, but up here … Well, it was all different.”

“Did you ever meet any of his friends or go to Old Soldiers with him?” MacNeice wrote
Old Soldiers
in his book and added two question marks.

“No, my job is here with our kids.”

“How are you getting by, Ms. Hughes?”

“If you mean moneywise, terrible. V.A. cut off his pension because they believe his disappearance was voluntary, which means they think he ran off with another woman—”

“And you don’t?”

“Not Gary …” Her breathing was heavy again, and he could hear by the static that she was wiping her eyes or nose. “Are you on welfare?”

“Yes. I had no choice.”

“I apologize for upsetting you with this call.”

“Please, Detective, I know you’re not being straight with me”—she was sobbing into the phone now—“Just tell me, what’s happened? Where’s Gary?”

“I can’t say any more at the moment, but I promise you we’ll talk again soon.” Before he hung up he heard another voice, perhaps the eldest son, asking his mother what was wrong.

MacNeice returned to the cubicle and briefed Williams. When he’d finished, he added Sue-Ellen’s name to the whiteboard, noting the three kids, below her husband’s. “As bad as that was, much worse is to come for Ms. Hughes.”

“Here’s his official portrait, sir.” Ryan handed MacNeice a printout: a head-and-shoulders portrait of a soldier standing in front of the American flag.

What struck MacNeice were the piercing eyes—dark and wise, absent of fear, malice or concern—studying the lens as if it were movement on a distant hill. His jaw was tucked in slightly and there was a clean leanness to him, the skin stretched tight over bone and sinew: a professional warrior. His mouth, while tight, betrayed neither hubris nor pride, nor a menacing suggestion of his abilities in combat. The uniform was crisp and impeccable.

The sad irony of the
Hamilton-Scourge
Project suddenly struck MacNeice. It had begun with the death of American servicemen, and now it appeared to have something to do with the death of one more, almost two centuries later. He taped the image to the whiteboard. “Along with those skeletons of the crews on the bottom of
the lake, I’d like my genie to arrange for Gary Robert Hughes to be repatriated with full military honours, and to see that his wife gets his pension retroactively.”

“Might be tough if he was up to his eyes in dirty work,” Williams said.

“History’s what gets reported. Depending on what we find, perhaps we’ll be able to report that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

A
FTER MANY ATTEMPTS
, Taaraa Ghosh had finally perfected her timing. She knew with certainty the moment her mother would appear at the top of the stairs. As well, she would speak to Taaraa before leaving the apartment to confirm that she was leaving right away. It wasn’t that she was worried about her mother or that the stairs leading down from the mountain were dangerous. She simply enjoyed sitting on the bench near the bottom, taking a few minutes to enjoy the sounds of birds, then looking up to see her mother crest the top of the mountain, waving to her in wide arcs as if she were flagging down a passing ship. That simple joy never failed to bring tears to her eyes. It was the certainty of seeing her, and being seen by her, that overwhelmed Taaraa.

Her mother had experienced much pain in her lifetime, enough pain for several lifetimes. And although they shopped for food together and took the bus out to the big-box store for everything from rice to underwear, this was always the moment—the exact moment—she cherished most.

Taaraa imagined her mother walking quickly to the threshold of the first step and hesitating till her daughter looked up from below. Once they’d seen each other, she would descend the stairs briskly. For some reason—her mother often asked why, but Taaraa couldn’t explain—Taaraa was always laughing when her mother arrived on the landing. They’d embrace and she would say, “Taaraa, daughter, why do you laugh?” The only answer that made any sense to her was “Life is funny …” and she’d continue laughing as they walked down the last few steps to the road.

Climbing up the stairs to the landing on this day, Taaraa was already smiling at the absurdity of their ritual: the mountain that wasn’t a mountain, the Bangladeshi woman walking down and up and down hundreds of stairs to spend the day with her Bangladeshi daughter.
Life is funny
, she thought,
and it couldn’t be more perfect
.

Vertesi had just finished briefing MacNeice and Williams about his visit to Mancini and ABC when a call came over his radio that a body had been discovered at the foot of the mountain, between the railroad tracks and the stairs on Wentworth. As he was just approaching Wentworth on King Street, he said he’d go up and check it out.

MacNeice walked over to the whiteboard and drew a tree diagram. He put
Smith-Deklin—Concrete Pouring
at the top. Below it he drew three lines to the concrete suppliers:
ABC, Mancini
and
McNamara
. Whether it was politics, the aggressive schedule of the endeavour, or that it was too big for one supplier, he felt certain the deaths of Gary Robert Hughes and Bermuda Shorts had something to do with the
Hamilton-Scourge
Project. Intuitively, he was also convinced that the answer was buried in the relationship among the three suppliers. To remind him later, he drew lines between the three suppliers and added two question marks.

“You think they’re involved, boss?” Williams asked.

“Just a thought.” He realized that if the contract had been split evenly, as Vertesi had confirmed, there was no obvious suggestion of mischief. On the other hand, the bodies hadn’t been wrapped in chains or dumped in the harbour inside a refrigerator; they were encased in concrete. Two of the competing firms had been American. Below Bermuda Shorts’s image he added:
American?
MacNeice put down the marker. He had long ago learned to trust his intuition, so he sat down at his desk to let the images speak to him. His cellphone rang. As he picked it up, he continued to stare at the whiteboard.

“Boss, how fast can you get up here?”

“Fast. What have you got?”

“Bad—and there’s two fairly green uniforms.”

“I’ll be right there.” MacNeice stood up and grabbed his jacket.

“You need me, sir?” Williams asked.

“No. Find out all you can about the Old Soldiers bar in Tonawanda,” MacNeice said. Then he left the cubicle and ran down the corridor to the stairs.

Parking behind Vertesi’s car, north of the graffiti-covered railway hut, MacNeice surveyed the scene with surprise and concern. He got out of the car and slammed the door. Traffic was still passing by, going up and down the hill. The teenagers who had likely discovered her were lining the mountain stairs above the body, and two uniformed officers were standing by. One of them was Metcalfe, a second-year kid from the east end; he had one hand over his nose and mouth, the other resting on the grip of his service weapon. MacNeice didn’t recognize the second uniform, who was busying himself with keeping the traffic moving. Vertesi’s car was parked just ahead of the Chevy but he was nowhere to be seen. Beyond the unmarked car was a single cruiser with flashing lights.

“Metcalfe! Clear that goddamn stair. Now!” MacNeice turned and signalled to the other cop, who was waving at the driver of a Buick to keep moving. “You want to be on traffic control? That can be arranged. This is a crime scene—close this street immediately. Secure the area. Where the hell are the paramedics? Where’s Vertesi?” The young officer, whose tag read
CHANG
, hurried over to him.

“Sorry, sir, will do. Ah … the paramedics got the message wrong; they’re at Wellington Street, and so are the police and firefighters. DI Vertesi, sir, he’s with her—the deceased’s mother.”

“Okay, Chang, thank you. Is this your first?”

“First homicide? Yes, sir. It sure isn’t an easy thing to see.”

“No, it isn’t.” MacNeice motioned to the activity on the stairs and the cars slowing down to see what was happening. “Now all this—technically this is referred to as a classic cluster-fuck, so get your tape and secure the area. No traffic up or down the hill, understood? And if you see people coming out of those houses, tell them to get back inside. Then call downtown and have them send officers to secure the top of the stairs and block the road at the top of the mountain. Nobody up or down on either, understood?”

“Yessir.” Chang ran off to retrieve the yellow tape from his trunk. Six of the kids approached as MacNeice walked towards the scene, and three others started climbing the stairs away from him, as if what had happened had nothing to do with them.

“Metcalfe, stop those three and bring them down here. We want statements from everyone.”

“That girl dead all right—tha’s my statement, officer,” a tall rangy teen with a sideways Bulls hat said. As his friends snickered, he added, “She soooo dead.”

“All of you just corral yourselves in front of this car. I promise you we won’t keep you for long.”

“Right, chief. Cuz we got appointments too.” Bulls hat again. Everyone giggled.

“I’m a huge Bulls fan,” MacNeice said, “but I think Miami’s going to wipe the floor with them this year.”

“Miami? Sure. Whatever. No way for Miami.” He gave a dismissive shoulder shrug and threw his right hand down with the two middle fingers folded and the others presumably forming a bull’s horns.

As MacNeice had expected, one of his friends chimed in. “Yeah, man, they got some serious guns down there. The man’s right, man—Miami solid.”

MacNeice left them to debate basketball, a sport he had little interest in. But at least he was certain they’d hang around.

A tiny woman had Vertesi pinned to the wall of a house on the corner. She was wrapped around him and wailing. Every few seconds she’d lunge for the curb, trying to get across the street, and Vertesi would hold her back. He waved to Vertesi to stay where he was for a while.

Chang was right; it wasn’t an easy thing to see. The young woman’s neck had been slashed upwards, from the right collarbone to the left ear. Her stomach had four large puncture wounds forming a rough circle from the bottom of her ribcage to the top of her pubic bone. She was wearing a blue paisley cotton dress and a pale yellow cardigan. Blood was still seeping from the wound on her neck, though her heart had stopped pumping some time ago. The massive stain on the ground and the dirt, bits of leaves and grass stuck to her face and dress indicated that she had hit the ground face down and had since been turned over. Adding insult and further indignity, the contents of her intestines had emptied onto the ground between her legs. MacNeice resisted reaching for his handkerchief out of respect for the girl and her mother.