A Pitying of Doves

by Steve Burrows

  Salter stirred almost imperceptibly. That’s it, sir; you keep his eyes on you. So I can reach those keys and get to Danny, get him away from the wire, away from danger. But she knew she never could. Hidalgo would touch the cable to the wire as much by instinct as anything else if she moved. She knew there would be no time. She couldn’t leave Danny like this, at the mercy of a madman who had already declared he was going to kill himself, kill them both. But she couldn’t save him either.

  Salter readied herself to move, but it was Jejeune who took a final step forward. He extended his arms to his sides and linked his fingers through the chain-link fence.

  Hidalgo hesitated, unsure what to do, the cable hanging loosely at his side. Jejeune locked his eyes onto Hidalgo’s, knowing that he had to. If he let their gazes slip apart, even for a moment, it could mean death for all of them.

  “Please step back, Inspector.” Hidalgo seemed on the verge of tears, his eyes watery, his lips trembling.

  But they knew that Jejeune would never do that, Holland and Salter and the others. They knew Jejeune would never unfurl his fingers from the fence and step back to safety. Not while Danny Maik was still shackled to the same fence. He would stay there, his face inches from the wire, staring at Hidalgo, imploring him not to raise the cable, not to commit the one final act of madness, of despair, that seemed his only exit from this nightmare he had brought upon himself.

  “I do not want to harm you, Inspector.” Hidalgo was almost weeping now, with frustration, with regret. “I have caused enough pain. There is no other way for me, or for this brave man here. It is the price we must pay for the situation we find ourselves in, the situation I have brought upon us all. But it does not deserve your sacrifice as well.”

  He was close to the edge. Salter could see it. Surely, Jejeune must see it, too. Hidalgo gripped the fence with his own free hand now, the black, writhing serpent of the cable sputtering as the exposed terminals arced to the wire again. The act may not even be deliberate now. The slightest gust of wind could tug the cable, bow the wire fence. It would not matter. The result would be the same.

  “If we die on this rooftop tonight, so will your dream,” said Jejeune quietly. “The birds will be taken away and given to a private collector, a petting zoo, somewhere, anywhere. Those doves will die in captivity, Señor Hidalgo, their precious, pure genetic material will be lost forever. But if we walk down from this place together, you and me and the sergeant, I give you my word I will not let that happen. I will make sure the birds go to a Socorro Dove captive breeding program, as you intended. They will contribute to the gene pool, strengthen it, and one day, their offspring will return to Socorro Island. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? To see the species reintroduced into the wild, to restore one small piece of Mexico’s lost heritage. That’s what all this has been about.”

  “It was my dream to be there when the first doves were released back into the wild. I will never see this moment now, I think.”

  Tell him he will, urged Salter silently. For God’s sake, for Danny’s sake. Tell him anything. Tell him about legal appeals, about early release programs. Confirm the only thing that will be able to salvage this situation, the only hope we have of getting off this roof with everybody still alive.

  “No,” said Jejeune, “you will never see it.”

  Hidalgo nodded. It had been a test, one final check to see if Domenic Jejeune would tell the truth, no matter what the circumstances, what the stakes. Hidalgo smiled as if he had always known how the detective would react. He turned and moved toward the fence, raising the cable. “Then the time has come, I think, to end this.”

  “But the day they are released, Ramon Santos’s legacy will be enshrined forever. You can ensure that, Señor Hidalgo, you can honour Ramon, honour his loyalty, a loyalty that sent him to the sanctuary for you, to do what you asked, to steal those birds, even though he knew it was wrong. The loyalty he paid for with his life.”

  Jejeune could see the tears on Hidalgo’s cheeks now, flowing unchecked. His hand was trembling, the cable quivering so near the cage sparks were arcing from it constantly.

  On the spiderweb of roadways far below the rooftop, life went on. People hurried to work, to meetings, to shops. Those beyond this street didn’t know what was happening on this roof, likely never would. There were no cameras this time, no media. Just people, whose lives hung in the balance, a hair’s breadth from death.

  “So much wrong I have done,” said Hidalgo. “So much.”

  Jejeune still hadn’t unfurled his fingers from the cage by the time Salter unlocked the handcuff from the fence and led Danny Maik, groggy and stumbling, to the service lift. Holland waited outside the cage for Hidalgo to come to him. There was no need to restrain him. With Holland in tow, the diplomat walked slowly toward the waiting lift, his head bowed. He entered without looking back at Jejeune. As the doors began to close, a uniformed officer squeezed in, gently cradling the bird cage. One final journey for the doves, to safety. Somewhere far from this rooftop. From Hidalgo.

  Jejeune peeled his fingers slowly from the wire and went to wait for the lift to return. It would only be five flights if he chose to take the stairs down. On a normal day, he would have welcomed the exercise. But just now, he didn’t feel as if he could trust his legs.

  50

  “Are you denying you knew it was Hidalgo before you went to St. Lucia?” Shepherd eyed him dubiously across the vast expanse of her paper-littered desk, but there was indulgence in her tone. Things had gone well, when they could have gone so terribly, catastrophically wrong. And she had Domenic Jejeune to thank for it.

  “I didn’t know for sure. I couldn’t understand why he would have done it. Not until I learned about the reintroduction plans. Then it made sense.”

  “Really, Domenic? This made sense to you?” Shepherd managed to keep any note of contempt out of her voice.

  “His interest in conservation, his first love, he called it, it would have allowed him to recognize the incredible importance of new, pure genetic material to the Socorro Dove captive breeding program. Perhaps on its own even that might not have been motive enough to steal them, but with plans in place to reintroduce the doves to Socorro Island, Hidalgo saw his chance to recover one tiny piece of the Mexican environment that has been lost.”

  “And he still followed conservation issues that closely, all these years after abandoning his studies?”

  “Once it has a grip on you, I don’t think it ever lets you go,” said Jejeune.

  “Still, you might have mentioned your suspicions, instead of telephoning them in to Sergeant Maik. Even if I couldn’t appreciate all the nuances of this whole reintroduction scheme. I may not appreciate fine art either, but I could certainly understand a motive of someone who killed to prevent a precious sculpture being destroyed, lost to the world forever. This is much the same thing, isn’t it?”

  But Jejeune could tell she didn’t need him to explain why he hadn’t confided in her. She knew already. She looked at him with an expression that seemed to hold both regret and sorrow, one that told him the price she had paid for ignoring Jejeune’s instincts about Guy Trueman and listening to her heart instead.

  “And you think recovering those birds was Hidalgo’s only motive for killing Waters?” She was ready to move on, to find solace in the details of the case, and Jejeune was happy to let her.

  He shrugged. “The new genetic material was too precious to allow it to disappear again into a private collection, especially that one. He knew that if Luisa Obregón ever got possession of those doves again, birds that had once belonged to her husband, she would never part with them for any amount of money. But he claims he didn’t go to the meeting with the intention of killing Waters, that it wasn’t revenge for Santos’s death.”

  “I know what he said, Domenic. I was here, remember? I’m asking if you believe him.”

  Jejeune shrugged again. “He took a knife with him.” As he had taken a heavy wrench to the rooftop, heavy
enough to disconnect the cable, heavy enough to strike two glancing blows to Danny Maik’s head, for which the sergeant had been under observation at the local hospital for the past twenty-four hours. Jejeune had no doubt Hidalgo believed what he said. But perhaps for Hidalgo, innocence only meant you weren’t conscious of those intentions, those forces driving you. And who knew, perhaps that was all innocence could ever really mean.

  Jejeune had not asked why the formal booking interview had taken place here, in Shepherd’s office, or why Shepherd had taken the unusual step of sitting in, even leading the proceedings at times. Perhaps she thought the more comfortable surroundings and the obvious deference to Hidalgo’s standing might encourage the Mexican Counsellor for Culture and Heritage to co-operate on the extent of Santos’s involvement. If so, she had been disappointed.

  Santos was innocent. Of everything. That was the price of Hidalgo’s confession.

  “He was there to commit a crime, Señor Hidalgo. Burglary,” Shepherd had said irritably. Having made the concessions she already had, the DCS was in no mood to be pushed around.

  “And you gave him your bird guide to help him commit that crime,” Jejeune had told Hidalgo. “Santos was no birder. He wouldn’t have known what a Socorro Dove looked like. You knew there were also Turtledoves in the sanctuary. So you gave him your book, bookmarked at the page. He was supposed to bring you the doves that didn’t look like the birds on that page, the ones that weren’t in the book.”

  Hidalgo had shrugged indifferently. “Ramon was following my instructions only. He had no idea he was being asked to do anything illegal. This is to be part of my confession. Otherwise, you will be left to prosecute me on the evidence. A case built on birding walks in Regent’s Park …” Hidalgo had spread his hands at this point and let his eyes flicker toward Shepherd, as if perhaps his diplomat’s antennae could detect the path of least resistance.

  In the end, Shepherd had relented. Ramon Santos was innocent; another victim of the tragic circumstances in this story, all stemming from the attempted theft of a couple of birds. It still seemed incredible to her. Nonsensical. But of course it was more complicated than that. Human motives always were. This was about immortality, having your contributions live on long after you were gone. The ongoing survival of a once-extinct species. It was a lofty ambition. Shepherd had regarded Hidalgo, sitting there, defiant, desperately trying to preserve his failed dignity. Such ambitions caused the fall of so many people.

  But other than the level of Santos’s involvement, Hidalgo’s version of events had enough of the ring of truth to let them pass relatively unquestioned. As soon as Hidalgo had realized Waters had the birds, he had called him, using the telephone number retrieved from the surveillance tapes, and offered to buy the birds. They had agreed to meet at a remote location on a dirt road near the Obregón’s property. But when Hidalgo got out of the car, Waters had seen only a Mexican. Though Hidalgo did not know it, Luisa Obregón had already refused to buy the birds, and Waters thought she had now sent a compatriot to take back her property by force — “The curse of the Latino complexion, Inspector.” But there was bitterness in Hidalgo’s sad smile. Waters had panicked and threatened to release the birds. He even opened the door to the cage. If Hidalgo had not killed him, “the birds, Inspector, would most certainly have escaped.”

  “What chance would they have had out there?” Hidalgo had asked them both plaintively through moist eyes, the only time he had shown any emotion during his formal confession. “They would surely have perished.”

  Shepherd picked up the report on her desk. Words. To explain humans killing each other over birds. She slapped the paper down again irritably. “Tell me, what you said to Hidalgo about the reintroduction project, is that true? Are the chances of success really that remote?”

  “You must know,” Jejeune had said to Hidalgo, “that a great many things have to go right for any reintroduction program to be successful.”

  Hidalgo had offered a smile, the only genuine one they had seen during the interview. For a moment all the guilt left his face, all the pain, the sadness. “We idealists must be allowed our fantasies, Inspector. Our dreams are all that separate humans from the animals we seek to save.”

  Jejeune pulled a face at the memory and looked at Shepherd. “Even after the last of the foraging goats and sheep are removed, it will take a generation or two before the natural vegetation produces the seeds and fruits a reintroduced dove population would need. Then there would be many years of delicate work for that population to become self-sustaining, if it ever does.”

  “So all this,” said Shepherd, “the deaths, everything — it was probably all for nothing?”

  No, not for nothing. And perhaps a Colleen Shepherd in a less damaged state might have recognized this. But she had taken a chance on a relationship again and been punished for it. It was probably easier to distrust optimistic outcomes today, to see only the darkness instead.

  Jejeune’s only remaining question was why she had summoned him to her office today. They had already rehashed most things in the immediate post-mortem of Hidalgo’s arrest and confession. She would need to have her story straight when she went before the head table, but she was clever enough to think on her feet, to memorize the stuff they knew and ad lib the rest. And Shepherd’s failure to ask about the incident with the St. Lucia Royal Constabulary undoubtedly meant that she had not been informed about it. Jejeune had no intention of changing that. Lindy had been supportive, indulgent, patient about the episode. Any eventual explanations, such as they were, would surely be owed to her alone. Jejeune watched Shepherd lift a piece of paper from the desk and replace it in exactly the same position. He supposed it gave her something to do with her hands and her eyes as she spoke.

  “I judged you unfairly, Domenic. In the Jag, that day, when I questioned your priorities. I want you to know, I recognize, we all recognize, what it must have cost you, to be willing to risk letting those birds starve to death to force Hidalgo’s hand. As he said, it was the only way we were ever going to get him. With his diplomatic immunity, had he not confessed, we could never have touched him. But it can’t have been an easy decision for you. I just want you to know it has been noted, at the highest levels, that you did not let your concern for the welfare of those birds compromise your sense of what needed to be done.”

  Her speech over, Shepherd brightened finally. “Right, well we have our result. The diplomatic fallout will be considerable, of course, but none of that is our doing. That said, I’m still extremely grateful we are on the outside of this one looking in. Can you handle the media briefing? I’ve told the chief constable I think it’s warranted in this case, given the work you’ve put in.”

  “I’d like to wait on that for the moment.” Jejeune had struck a tone somewhere between a request and a statement. As far as Shepherd could tell, it was one all his own. And it never failed to make her look up at him.

  “Is there anything I should be aware of?”

  Jejeune shrugged. “Fine art. I need to identify a bird sculpture.”

  51

  “So I’m free to go, I understand? Nothing to hold me on. Don’t worry, Danny, old son, I’m not the type to say I told you so. Oh, looks like I just did.”

  Guy Trueman gave Maik a mirthless grin. He was sitting at a desk, hurriedly tucking his things into his pockets — wallet, phone, keys — not bothering to check them. On the desk between them was a large manila envelope, torn untidily across its entire length. Redirected anger, Guy? Frustration? Or just a desire to get your belongings and get out of here as quickly as possible?

  Maik sat down at the desk opposite him. Trueman’s eyes found their way to the bandage on the side of Maik’s head. Danny had tried to get by with the smallest dressing possible on the day of his return to work, but there had been some weeping from the site of the larger of the two wounds, and Lauren Salter had sat him down unceremoniously at his desk and affixed this monstrosity, with orders that it not be removed. It had be
en a strange encounter, Salter at once solicitous and yet distant, as if she couldn’t prevent herself from helping him, even if she wasn’t particularly impressed with herself for doing so. It was probably this, the fact that she had so obviously acted against her own instincts, which prevented Danny from removing the bandage as soon as he was out of her sight. He knew that if she saw him again later and the dressing was gone, she would feel betrayed in some way, disappointed in him. It had affected them all, Danny realized, this case, scarred them all in ways perhaps none of them really yet understood.

  “Looks like you took a fair old wallop to the noggin,” said Trueman. “Still, at least they didn’t get anywhere important.”

  He thinks it’s okay, that he can just turn it on, that megawatt smile and the old school charm and we’ll be back to normal. Mates again, comrades in arms, water under the bridge. But what had been broken, for Danny, could never be repaired. Perhaps his expression told Trueman this, because his ex-CO stopped smiling, sitting there now, hands loosely resting on the desk, waiting to say his farewells.

  “Efren Hidalgo claims he wasn’t overly quiet when he left that morning,” said Maik. “He said he half-expected to have to make up some story for his personal security executive on his way out. But that his personal security executive never stirred.”

  Trueman looked at Maik, the playfulness gone now, replaced by a look of resignation.

  “It’s the pictures, Danny. When I close my eyes at night. The things I’ve seen, we’ve both seen. And the noises, all those sounds, the cries, the explosions, the … the noises. I can’t get them out of my head. During the day you can keep them at bay, stay busy, don’t think about things too much. But at night, when it’s quiet, when there’s nobody around to turn them off … How do you shut them out? Or have you just learned to live with them? You’re a lucky man if you have.”

  Lucky? No, Maik didn’t think so. But however he dealt with his own memories, that was not why he had sought out Guy Trueman before he was released.