This Thing of Darkness (2 page)

A little ways up, he spotted it in an alleyway, almost hidden in the window well of a building, like the bum had tried to get out of sight. Outrage propelled him forward, a string of insults already forming on his lips. The culprit was completely wrapped in the bag except for his stockinged feet. Not a single hole in those fancy socks, Screech thought, adding fuel to his outrage. He propped himself against the wall so he could aim a good kick. His foot connected with soft flesh, but there was no grunt. No recoil. Understanding penetrated Screech's brain. He'd felt that dead weight before. Either the guy was totally wasted, or he was dead.

Either way, it was not Screech's business, but there was no point in a good sleeping bag going to waste. But when he leaned down to grab a corner, the bag felt crusty and damp. He snatched his hand away in disgust and stared at the red stains on it. Then he noticed the red all over the ground in half-dried streaks and pools spreading from beneath the body.

Fuck! He reeled back and tripped on the curb, twisting his good ankle and landing hard on his rear. Crablike, he scuttled backwards into the middle of Rideau Street. Horns blared, tires squealed, and a car swerved by him so close he felt its heat. He scrambled back to the curb. Waved a hand to flag someone down. What was everybody's goddamn hurry?

Finally a car veered over to the curb, a door slammed and boots stomped around the car.

“What the fuck, Screech?” A familiar voice shouted.

Screech recognized a beat cop who brought him food and supplies when times were tough. Surprised at his relief, he tried to get his rattled brain in gear. “There's a sleeping bag,” he said. “Bleeding. Dying.” Then he gave up and used his trembling finger to point.

Two

G
reen locked up the bikes and piled Sharon, Tony and the vegetables into a cab. Although her eyes were glum, Sharon hadn't uttered a peep of reproach, but Tony had to be cajoled into the back seat, squirming and protesting that he wanted to see the fire trucks. He was slightly mollified by the promise of lunch with Zaydie later on, but Green could still see his face pressed against the rear window as the cab pulled away. Trying to push guilt out of his mind, he called for a cruiser to take him to the crime scene.

There was a well-established protocol for homicide investigations, and Green knew it would be some time before he'd learn many details about the victim and the crime scene itself. But from the distraught patrolman who was first on the scene, Brian Sullivan had learned enough to make the call to Green. “It's a homicide all right,” he'd said, “and not your usual homicide around here. An old man beaten beyond recognition. I thought under the circumstances, in this neighbourhood...”

Sullivan hadn't needed to say more. While Green waited for the cruiser, he phoned his father. When he heard the familiar, singsong Yiddish voice, he felt a wash of relief.

“You okay, Dad?”

“I shouldn't be?”

“You been outside today?”

“I'm watching a black preacher cure a blind boy. Maybe when that's over.”

“Okay.” Green paused. No point in alarming his father, who lived with enough fears of his own making. Fears planted long ago, by jack boots and train whistles and the barking of guard dogs along the barb wire of the death camp. “I'm in town. How about we go to Nate's for some cheese blintzes?”

“Why?”

Green kept his tone light. “I need a reason?”

“No. Why are you in town? It's Sunday.”

“Business, Dad.”

“
Oy,
Mishka. Always business.”

The cruiser pulled up, leaving Green no time to counter the rebuke. By now, Rideau Street was in gridlock, and even the cruiser's roof lights did little to speed them up. Curious pedestrians clogged the sidewalk as they tried to get a closer look. Cars jockeyed for space amid the rumbling trucks and buses that inched through the lights. Only the cyclists wove in and out, gleefully dodging potholes and cars on their way to the tree-lined bike paths along Ottawa's river system. The eclectic jumble of shops that brought Rideau Street to life— the tattoo parlours and African restaurants next to dance clubs, bakeries and body piercing salons—were all wide open, their displays spilling onto the sidewalk before them.

Some were new, catering to the tougher elements that had taken over the neighbourhood in recent decades, but others, like Nate's Deli, clung stubbornly to their immigrant, working class glory days. When Green was a little boy growing up in one of the dilapidated Victorian redbrick townhouses just to the north, his mother had sent him to the Rideau Bakery for
challah
and to Nate's for
varenikes
and white fish. Many of the tenements had been bulldozed to make room for the subsidized slums that masqueraded as urban renewal, but the shops were still there, familiar landmarks on the evolving street.

Also familiar, unfortunately, was the scene that greeted him just a block from King Edward Avenue. Three police cruisers were flashing blue and red in the sunlight, and parked next to them was a white Forensic Identification van. Assaults, muggings, burglaries, drug disputes and booze-fuelled brawls were all common on the volatile bar strips of the Byward Market.

This time, however, a black coroner's van had joined the line of official vehicles.

Green directed the cruiser to the curb behind the coroner's van and scanned the officials gathered in the corner behind the yellow police tape. In their zeal to prevent scene contamination, the first responders had secured not only the alleyway but half a city block, and two uniforms had been deployed to conduct traffic in a vain attempt to ease the snarl. Green could see Brian Sullivan standing just outside the secured area, conferring with an Ident officer. Behind them, Green could see more officials in white Tyvek suits bent over something in the alley. At the mouth of the alley, abandoned except for a numbered forensic marker, lay an old-fashioned wooden cane like the one Green's father used. In spite of himself, his gut tightened.

His father's gentle rebuke came back to him now as he stood at the edge of the crime scene. He'd been investigating major crimes for nearly twenty years and had stood at the edge of countless crime scenes, waiting for the coroner's report. The crime scene both repulsed and fascinated him, each one a new challenge, each one a clash with villainy. Now, as an inspector, he no longer attended crime scenes; Brian Sullivan and his major crimes detectives took the calls and worked the cases, while Green sat around committee tables, overseeing the broader picture, allocating resources and planning future initiatives. Even the catchwords irked him. Yet he also knew that after twenty soul-battering years on the front lines of rape and murder, he'd had no choice but to retreat.

Standing outside the Rideau Street crime scene, however, he felt not exhilarated but slightly sick. In his mind was the image of an elderly man walking down the street, perhaps on his way home to some modest seniors' residence in Sandy Hill, much like the one Sid Green lived in only a few blocks away. With his cane, he had probably walked slowly and stiffly, his head bent to watch his footing. He might even have been a little deaf, easy prey for the punk who'd crept up behind him. Not just knocked him down, which would have been appalling enough, but beat him to death. Green felt a tremor of rage at the affront.

Brian Sullivan turned and glanced around the street thoughtfully, no doubt trying to judge where the killer had come from. Had he been lying in wait in the alleyway and somehow lured the victim into an ambush? The killer had chosen a particularly disreputable corner populated by street people, drug dealers and low-end hookers working the fringe of the club district. A corner decrepit by day, dangerous by night. Both a beer and a liquor store were within a couple of blocks, and desperation sometimes drove alcoholics to extreme actions. But no sooner had the thought crossed Green's mind than he dismissed it. This was no simple mugging; from Sullivan's description, it had been a rage out of control.

Other than the all-night grocery store and a pawn shop, there was nothing in the immediate vicinity that would have attracted the killer to that corner. Possibly a drug or sex deal in the alleyway, which the old man had the misfortune to witness. But again, that hardly justified the violence of the beating. More likely, the killer had spotted the old man a few blocks earlier, trailed him and used the cover of the alley to strike.

Movement at the crime scene caught Green's eye, and he glanced back to see Sullivan striding towards him. The big Irish farm boy still moved with a footballer's grace, but twenty-five years of fast food, hasty snacks and beer had added a substantial gut to his mammoth frame. It strained the buttons of his white dress shirt beneath his open sports jacket. High blood pressure had mottled his freckled face, and for the first time Green saw glints of silver in his tufted, straw-coloured hair. Sullivan shook his head grimly as he ducked under the yellow tape.

“It's not my father,” Green said.

“I didn't think so. This man looks much larger. I estimate five-ten, one hundred and seventy pounds. He has white hair, but he doesn't seem as...” Sullivan paused as if looking for a neutral word.

“Withered?” Green supplied. His father was in his late eighties, and years of chronic illness and depression had whittled his body to a wraith. “Any
ID
on him?”

Sullivan shook his head.“Pockets are empty, watch gone— you can still see the indents of the links on his wrist. The bastard even took the rings off his fingers.”

“Wedding finger?” Not that it would mean anything. Green's father still wore his wedding band twenty years after his mother's death.

Sullivan nodded. “And on the pinky finger of his right hand. On the surface, it looks like a mugging turned ugly.”

“How long has he been dead?”

Sullivan turned to nod towards the white-suited officials clustered over the body. Two Ident officers, two morgue assistants, and in the middle, looming larger than any of them, the flamboyant, white-maned figure of Dr. Alexander MacPhail. Green could hear his booming Scottish brogue from a hundred feet away, admonishing Lyle Cunningham's junior Ident assistant not to vomit on the hands.

“Bag them, laddie! That's all I asked!”

Sullivan even managed a chuckle.“Lyle's breaking in a new lad, but I don't think he'll last a week. He's already puked in the corner twice.”

“So they're a bit behind schedule.”

Sullivan shrugged. “MacPhail's not giving us a thing yet, till he gets all his calculations in, but I did our usual simple test—”

“The toe test?”

Sullivan nodded. “He's stiffened up nicely. Rigor's pretty complete. With the cold last night, I'd guess he's been dead eight to twelve hours.”

Green considered the implications. Eight hours made it four o'clock in the morning, an unlikely time to be out for a stroll. It made more sense that the old man had been assaulted a couple of hours earlier than that, when innocent passersby were safely tucked into bed and the streets were overrun with punks. The question was—why hadn't the old man been tucked into bed too?

“What does he look like? Homeless?”

Sullivan's brows shot up. “Oh, no! He was wearing a three-piece suit, a tie and a nice camelhair overcoat. All about twenty years out of date, according to MacPhail, but in perfect shape. Expensive, MacPhail says, and he should know. Probably didn't get stolen because it was covered in blood. His shoes are gone.”

“Pricey Italian leather, I bet. A lowlife with taste?”

“Well, they could have been stolen after the fact, by some street bum in need.”

“For that matter,” Green said, “all the stuff could have been stolen after the fact by someone who stumbled upon the body.”

“But then we don't have a motive for the attack, do we?”

Green shrugged. He wasn't sure Italian shoes, some rings and a dress watch were motive enough to obliterate a man's head. “Not till we find out who this guy was and what he was doing out that late.” He broke off as he watched a tall, slender woman stroll languidly towards them, flicking her cellphone shut. She was nicely packaged in a navy jacket and beige pants — or as Sharon would have scolded him, taupe—and a simple gold scarf at her neck. She wore no make-up that Green could detect, but her skin was like flawless cream. She had long legs, a straight back, and everything about her flowed, including her blonde hair, which was loosely clipped in a long ponytail down her back.

Green shot Sullivan a look to see if he too was watching. Sullivan grinned.“Our new sergeant wanted to take the lead on this herself, so I figured why not? This will hit the media—are the elderly safe on their own streets?—and they'll lap her up.”

“Not to mention our new police chief. The Force's ‘diversity in hiring' program visible for all to see, and she's fluently bilingual to boot.”

Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque frowned fleetingly at the sight of Green before pasting a determined smile on her face. Green had met her only once, at her transfer interview the month before, but he'd analyzed her file and sought the opinion of colleagues. Determined was the word most frequently mentioned. Along with smart.

“Good morning, Inspector,” Levesque said with a hint of French lilt. She extended her hand. “Nice to see you again.”

Ambitious too, the file had said. Nothing wrong with ambition, as long as it was tempered by competence. At five- foot-ten, she matched him in height, yet with her high cheekbones and long, patrician nose, he almost felt as if she were looking down on him. Conscious of his sweaty
T
-shirt and bike-helmet hair, he drew himself up.

“Your first case is a sad one.”

She nodded. “And messy. Forensics says there is a lot of physical evidence, and they were able to lift some tissue from under the nails. It seems the victim fought back. His cane has a crack in it, and what looks like blood on the tip.”