Beautiful Lie the Dead

by Barbara Fradkin

  “Or his legal bill. Brandon was only a baby at the time and grew up listening to what a great lawyer his father had been. But Meredith says his mother never told him a thing about how he died.”

  * * *

  Meredith’s room had the dishevelled, disorganized look of a temporary lodging. She had moved back there only a month earlier when her apartment lease had expired, and suitcases and boxes cluttered the floor. Decorated in frilly blues and yellows, the room had retained its little girl feel, but the stuffed animals on the shelf over the bed looked like they hadn’t been moved in years. The flowery duvet was flung back in a heap, and the sheets were rumpled as if the woman had leaped out of bed at seven a.m. and never given them a second thought. Jeans, a sweater and a bra were slung over the back of the desk chair, and socks and underwear spilled out of a suitcase on the floor. The desk was piled high with papers, and an unopened laptop perched precariously on top.

  Six books teetered on the bedside table, splayed open half-read. This woman had six books on the go, Sue thought in awe as she wandered over for a peek. Multi-tasking or easily bored? Two were travel books on Ethiopia, another on family law, but one was a Mary Jane Maffini mystery. Sue warmed to the woman. Maffini’s light-hearted mysteries had lifted her own spirits many times during those awful months at the Rehab hospital, when doctors said she’d never walk again, let alone return to police work. When she was relearning to guide a spoon to her mouth.

  One book, almost hidden at the bottom of the pile, piqued her curiosity. The Quiet Revolution and Beyond: Quebec in the 1970’s. A weird selection for a woman preparing for a teaching job in Africa. She picked it up and noted that it was splayed open to a chapter on McGill and the erosion of English higher education.

  She turned to Norah and Reg, who were hovering in the doorway. “Any idea why she was reading about Quebec history?”

  They shrugged like matching marionettes. “Maybe because of her immigration work with Haitians last year? She was helping families sponsor their relatives to come here after the quake. Lots of Haitians families settled in Montreal.” Reg paused, and a hint of a scowl crossed his face. “French connection, you know.”

  “But Meredith reads everything,” Norah added. “Ever since she was a little girl. Always had one book or another with her, read on buses, walking down the street, even at the dinner table.” She waved her hand towards the IKEA bookshelf under the window, from which books stuck out every which way. No Nancy Drews, but Sue recognized two entire shelves of Hardy Boys. “I don’t even know where she got them half the time. The shelves kept filling up faster than I could give them to the rummage sale.”

  “Our girl’s got a quick mind. You gotta keep it fed,” Reg countered. “She was always asking questions, and when she wanted an answer, she’d turn to a book.” He glanced at the laptop with a frown. “Or nowadays, a computer. Whenever she was home, she spent hours up here on that thing.”

  “Too many hours,” Norah muttered her usual two cents.

  Sue joined Bob, who had walked over to study the computer. Her gaze drifted over the desk, which was an innocent-looking clutter of travel print-outs, receipts, drafts of wedding invitations, seating plans, to-do lists. She scanned one of these for clues but nothing seemed unusual. Order corsages, speak to E about dessert? nut allergies, dye shoes. A bride trying to keep track of the massive details of a wedding. Sue shuddered at the thought. Not hers. Barefoot on a beach somewhere.

  Bob opened the laptop, and they all watched as the screen lit up with icons. Dozens of them. Meredith’s laptop was as cluttered as her desk and bedside table. Despite her months being chained to the computer at work, Sue didn’t like the things. She still blundered around causing crashes and error messages.

  “I’d like our computer experts to take a look at this,” Bob said. “Is that all right?”

  Reg nodded. “Brandon and I have looked at it, hoping maybe there would be clues, you know? She’s got thousands of emails— saves every one, I think— but we couldn’t see anything strange.

  Except all the people emailing ‘where are you?’”

  “Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

  Reg hesitated. “Kids these days have so many friends, her mother and I can’t keep up. She’s got one of those Facebook accounts too, but it has a password. We tried every one we could think of, but no luck.”

  Bob tucked the laptop under his arm. “No problem. I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible.”

  * * *

  Despite her obvious effort to hide it, Sue Peters’ limp was visible from across the squad room as she and Gibbs made their way towards Green’s office. She was perspiring as if fighting pain.

  She’s still not ready for full-time hours, Green thought with a twinge of guilt. He’d seen her head out with Gibbs earlier but was of two minds whether to intervene. He’d subscribed to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” school of boss management often enough himself in the past.

  The grin on her flushed face soon dispelled his doubts. Whatever role she’d played, the field excursion had galvanized her. She let Gibbs give the official report of his interview, but she couldn’t resist jumping in at the end.

  “From what Bob told me, it sounds like Mom wears the pants in that family, and Dad’s a lovable lump who takes his cue from her if he knows what’s good for him. They’ve still got her room decked out in frills and girly colours from her childhood, and she’s filled it with jeans, Hardy Boys, books on hiking in the third world and law. Books everywhere, but hardly a make-up kit or lacy thong in sight. She mystifies them, and although Dad loves her to pieces in spite of that, I got the feeling—I mean, Bob got the feeling Mom is less forgiving. She thinks her daughter should be more loyal, and don’t get her started on the future mother-in-law.”

  Green sat back, impressed by the glimpse of the old Sue, but wondering if she and Bob had a shred of tangible evidence to back up their gut. “Any conflicts that may be relevant to the investigation? Any sign she may have got cold feet?”

  “Just one small hint.” Sue laughed. “One of the millions of pieces of paper on her desk? ‘Elena’s fucking to-do list.’ But I think the worst Meredith might do is drag Brandon off to get married on a beach in Majorca.” Her grin faded. “But I’d like to keep working on the follow-up tomorrow, sir. On the phone, I mean. I think there’s more there.”

  A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Like what?”

  “Like her computer. Apparently she spends hours on it. We should see what she’s up to.”

  Green nodded. “Okay, but keep Sergeant Li informed.”

  “And...”

  Green raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “She was reading a book about McGill.”

  “How’s that relevant? I thought the parents said she reads everything.”

  “It may not be relevant, but both Brandon’s parents went to McGill. Don’t you always say, in a murder investigation you have to shine a spotlight into the darkest corners that no one wants you to find?” She flushed. “I mean, I know this is not a murder inquiry, but...”

  Green smiled at her. He loved the light in her eyes, the unorthodox insatiability of her mind. He loved especially that she had been listening to him. “Shine away, detective. We don’t know what this is yet.”

  She left his office with a new bounce in her step, giving her dreary computer the finger as she yanked her coat off the rack and headed home for some much-needed rest. Green’s final words seemed to reverberate forever in his tiny office. We don’t know what this is yet. True, but the alarm bells were getting louder. Tips and reports of sightings had been pouring in all day but all had proved useless.

  So far, Li’s cautious probing into Brandon Longstreet’s background had turned up no dark side. Despite his silver spoon birth and Ashbury private school education, the young man seemed to take his commitment to the common good seriously. As the end of his family medicine residency drew near, he had rejected more lucrative private practice offers ac
ross Canada in order to join an international aid team. He was a card-carrying member of the Green Party and had never received so much as a speeding ticket. Even his ex-girlfriends thought he was a gem. No temper, no wild side.

  Perfection made Green nervous. It was time to find out what Adam Jules knew about the mystery.

  He had phoned Jules’s East Division office that morning when Sergeant Li first told him about the missing woman. To his surprise, Jules had not yet called him back. Green had also sent an email update to which Jules had not replied, although his clerk assured Green that he was at the station. Green suppressed his annoyance. First the man had waylaid him with a cryptic request about hit and runs and people unaccounted for, and now he was ignoring all Green’s attempts to contact him.

  But if Jules knew something, the investigation had to be informed.

  Opening his address book, Green looked up Jules’s private cell phone number and picked up his phone. The cell phone went to voice mail after two rings, leaving Green nearly speechless. Jules was screening his calls! Not only ignoring him, but actively avoiding him.

  Whatever the hell this was about, Green could keep the investigation low-key no longer. A young woman was missing, and the early darkness of another frigid night was closing in.

  Something more had to be done, he thought, picking up his phone again to call the duty inspector.

  FOUR

  Within an hour, a full-scale ground search was underway, and although the duty inspector pulled out all the stops, he was not optimistic.

  “The goddamn city is more than 4500 square kilometres, Green, and that’s assuming she even stayed in the city and isn’t sunning herself on a beach in Cuba.”

  “At least we know that’s unlikely,” Green replied. “There’s no record of her leaving the country.”

  “But in case it escaped your notice, we got forty centimetres of snow since she disappeared and more coming down as we speak. We could be standing on top of her and not know it. Plus the rivers aren’t frozen yet, and if she thought she could take a short cut across the Rideau River, she could be on the bottom somewhere.”

  Green was silent. Inspector Doyle was just sounding off. The two of them were in the communication centre, and Doyle was merely saying in private what he would never say on the record.

  Somewhere in this dark, frigid city, a young woman was lost and no one had a clue where to look. Officers were still piecing together her final day, which according to her parents had started normally enough. She had taken Monday off work to run errands for the wedding, and after her usual breakfast of yogurt and granola, she had set off on the bus for downtown. She’d been a bit vague about the errands, and her mother had not pressed her. Meredith had always liked her independence, she’d said, and she was getting a little tense as the date drew near.

  The bus driver remembered her getting off at the Westboro transit station, but from there she was swallowed up in the crowds of commuters and Christmas shoppers heading downtown.

  Using “Elena’s fucking to-do list” which Gibbs had taken from the house, officers were tracking down each of the businesses involved, from florist to travel medicine clinic, but by eight o’clock that evening there had not been a single confirmed sighting. Whatever Meredith had done that day, she had not made a dent in the fucking to-do list.

  She had phoned her friend Jessica at 5:45, but from her cellphone, so she could have been anywhere. Jessica remembered chatter and Christmas music in the background, so volunteers had been dispatched with her photo to all the malls between downtown and Bayshore.

  “But it’s a goddamn needle in a haystack,” Doyle said. “Every two-bit corner store plays Christmas music. So does the radio. I heard ‘Sleigh Bells’ a hundred times today alone!”

  Meredith’s description was on every radio station, her photo on every television channel and in every patrol car. Taxi drivers had been alerted. “Something will break,” Green said. “Now that it’s caught the public eye, someone will remember seeing her.”

  Doyle eyed him grimly. Both men knew there would be a thousand sightings, and nine hundred and ninety-nine would be false.

  By the time Green finally left the station at nine p.m., however, that one useful lead had not materialized. Snow was falling thickly again, blanketing sound and snarling pre-Christmas traffic on the slippery roads. Red tail lights stretched solid along the Queensway in both directions as cars crawled out towards the suburbs. Turning his back gratefully on the gridlock, Green steered his Subaru along Catherine Street towards his Highland Park home. On his quiet residential backstreet, Christmas lights caught the snowflakes and glistened like rubies and emeralds on the freshly fallen snow. For a moment he forgot how much he hated winter.

  He was reminded again when he reached his house to find ten centimetres of fresh snow waiting for him on the driveway. The double furrow of tire tracks from Sharon’s car was fading under new snow. His wife had long since gone to work, leaving Hannah in charge of Tony and dinner.

  The television was blasting “So You Think You Can Dance” in the living room and the teenager and the five-year-old were sprawled on the floor eating chips and laughing. The only one to notice his arrival was Modo, who padded into the hall wagging her tail shyly. Modo was a humane society acquisition who even after two years in their home still acted as if she feared she was unwelcome. He ruffled her ears as he glanced at the mail Sharon had left on the hall table. Nothing but Christmas flyers.

  A commercial came on, and Tony leaped to his feet and came running into the hall. He laughed when Green swooped him up into the air. “What are you still doing up, buddy!”

  “Hannah said I could watch instead of a story.”

  Green glanced at Hannah, whose expression said “I’ve fed him and entertained him. You want to make something of it?” Not tonight, sweetheart, he thought. Not when we have other things to talk about. At least Tony was in his pyjamas. With a final hug, Green set him down. “As soon as that’s over, then. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  He went into the living room to drop a kiss on his daughter’s head before heading into the kitchen to see what he could scrounge. The remains of pizza sat congealing in the fridge. Pizza had been ordered in for the teams in the central command post at the station, and he had snagged two slices while he and the duty inspector reviewed reports. Now he bypassed the pizza in favour of chocolate cake. No sooner had he taken his first bite and found the Sudoku in the morning paper when Tony came flying into the kitchen, ricocheting off walls as he imitated the latest contestant. Hip hop. Green shuddered.

  “You want Tom Sawyer, or are you going to read your own book?”

  “I want to stay down here with you and eat cake!”

  Green eyed his son’s broad, infectious smile. Sharon’s smile, dazzling in its warmth. He’d hardly seen the little guy today. Conceding defeat, he cut another slice and listened while Tony chattered on about the show. Through the chatter he heard Hannah switch off the television. She came to stand in the kitchen doorway a minute, watching them, then turned to head upstairs. She looked unusually worried. He wondered if her mother had already been working on her.

  It was almost an hour before he gave Tony his final goodnight kiss and shut his bedroom door. Barely five years old, the little boy seemed to need less sleep than most grown men and had devised a remarkable repertoire of stall tactics. Half an hour of bedtime story was essential, despite the fact that Tony was beginning to read for himself. Then came a dozen questions about the chapter they had read and what was going to happen to Tom Sawyer next.

  Hannah’s door was closed by the time Green finished, and he went down to pour himself a glass of wine before facing her, fortifying himself not for his daughter but for the tricky foray into the mother-daughter minefield.

  To his surprise, she was standing in the kitchen doorway when he turned around. The worried look was back. “That missing woman. That’s where you were tonight?”

  He nodded.

  “A
ny luck finding her?”

  “Not yet. But she may just have taken off.” Green didn’t like bringing his work home. He needed some walls, not only to shield his family but himself. There had to be a place in his life where evil was barred at the door. He took a deep breath, preparing to change the subject. “Want some wine?”

  Hannah’s smile grew wary. “Uh-oh.”

  He grinned, hoping to ease the path. He had no worries about the example he was setting. In her wild eighteen years, Hannah had done far worse. “Your mother called.”

  “I figured something like that.”

  “She wants you home for the holidays.”

  “I am home.”

  It was three simple words, but it packed a punch. For a moment he couldn’t speak. As if she feared she’d strayed too far into mushy land, she shrugged. “Christmas in Lotusland isn’t the same. It rains, everyone gets hammered and Mom gets the whole thing catered with the weirdest food. Peking duck, Pad Thai, seaweed soufflé. She and Fred get in a fight, he goes off to see his kids and I have to listen to Mom say I’m all she’s got.”

  Green smiled at her sadly. It sounded so like Ashley; she’d always had the brains and maturity of a two-year-old. “Maybe things are different now.”

  “Yeah, maybe she’ll have had so much botox and nip and tuck that I won’t recognize her. Maybe she’ll have dyed her hair black.”

  “She misses you, honey.”

  “She doesn’t even know who I am!” Hannah shot back. She had joined him at the kitchen table, and he noted that she’d already drained her wine glass. He didn’t offer another, suspecting that even the first had been a mistake.

  “Honestly, all those years I lived with her, I never felt like I belonged. I kept thinking there was something wrong with me, because I’d look at Mom with her bleached blonde hair and her pretty dresses and her little girl oohs and ahhs, and I’d feel like a big, ugly lump!”

  Green suppressed his astonishment. Hannah was barely five-foot two, as petite and delicate as a pixie. “You’re gorgeous!” he said, feeling like all fathers the inadequacy of the praise. As he expected, she snorted in dismissal.