“Are you up to driving, Robbie? I’m near Manotick, so why don’t I meet you there for a sandwich?”
“I can’t eat, for God’s sake!”
Who’s talking about you, Green thought, but behaved himself. “Coffee then. At the pub on—”
“I want to go out to the farm.”
Oh, fuck. “Not a good idea, Robbie. It’s a restricted area right now. Let’s sit down someplace relaxing, and I’ll bring you up to date.”
Green had tried to sound soothing, but even so, Robbie peeled into the pub parking lot half an hour later, suggesting he must have virtually sprouted wings. He was wide-eyed and flying on adrenaline. Green sketched as brief and understated a picture of the case as he could manage, but Robbie grew whiter with every detail. By the end, tears brimmed in his eyes, and he clutched his head in his hands.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod,” he whispered over and over, beginning to hyperventilate.
Green glanced around the little pub. He had chosen a booth tucked around the corner near the kitchen, and fortunately the mid-afternoon crowd was thin, so no one was paying them any heed. He searched in vain for a paper bag, but finally had to improvise.
“Take it easy. Cup your hands around your mouth and breathe. Don’t talk, just breathe.”
Robbie raised shaking hands to his face and tried to breathe. A lone tear spilled over and travelled down his cheek.
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Green said. “We haven’t even found a body yet, let alone identified it as Derek.”
“But it’s going to be there,” Robbie said. “You know that. Tom’s letter, the fire, the axes—it all fits! Ohmigod! To think this happened, and the whole fucking family just buried it!” He pressed his hands to his eyes, fighting emotion. Rage or grief, Green wasn’t sure. Probably a little of both. “I thought it was all my fault! All my fault that my father drank, that my mother killed herself, that no one would play with me and there were no flowers in the garden and no tree fort in the woods. I thought they didn’t care! I was the extra son, the accident that nobody really wanted. I used to look at those pictures in the album, and I saw how happy they used to be, but never with me.” Tears poured down now, mingling unnoticed with the torrent of words. “And all along it was this fucking...!”
He groped at the air in a futile search for a word monstrous enough to describe the event. For a moment he was struck dumb, then he dropped his hands and took a deep breath. “You may not know the body is there, but I do. I even know how he was killed. We never had axes at the farm after that, not even when I insisted. When I bought an axe once to split wood, Dad threw it in the river and went on a two-day bender. I wanted to rebuild the shed instead of leaving that eyesore, but Mum nearly flipped her lid.” He raised ravaged eyes to Green. “I’ve lived with this for twenty years, Inspector. I know it’s true. I’ve never known why, but this... Mum, Benji...” His voice snagged. “This explains it all.”
Green steeled himself to insert his first cautious probe. He was no expert in trauma cases nor in the recovery of childhood memory, but he’d seen enough trauma victims in his time to venture a try. At all costs, he had to avoid suggestive or leading questions.
“Do you remember anything at all about it, Robbie? Anything about that day?”
Robbie nodded. “I remember the fire. I had nightmares about fires for years. I was locked in my room—I guess Mom and Dad wanted me safe and out of the way—but I remember the noise of the flames. They roared and crackled like thunder. I’d never heard a fire so loud. I remember being scared my parents would get hurt. And it stank. A horrible stink I’ll never forget. Sweet, putrid, so sharp it clung to your nose and stayed in the air for days, even after they put the fire out.”
Burnt flesh does have a stink all its own, Green thought grimly. “Do you remember them putting it out?”
“I couldn’t see, because my bedroom was at the back, but I remember people screaming. Ohmigod, everyone was screaming. And there was a...” He stopped, his eyes narrowing as if he were casting his thoughts deep into forgotten corners of his mind. “There was one sound coming from a bedroom nearby. A high-pitched wailing, like someone keening, that went on all night. Nobody came. Not to get me, not to stop the keening. I was so scared I curled up under my bed. It was very hot in the house, and I was afraid it was burning up too. Ohmigod, I haven’t thought about this in years!”
“It might help us if you can remember how the fire started.”
Robbie was shaking his head. “That’s all that sticks in my mind. The fire raging.”
“Was it day or night?”
Robbie picked up his cup in both hands, tried to take a sip but couldn’t steady the cup. With a grimace, he cradled it as if to warm his hands. “It must have been day when it started because I remember it gradually getting darker in my room. And all I could see was this spooky orange glow on the trees.”
Knowing that the crime had occurred in May and that Derek was supposed to be at the bus station in Ottawa at 4:30, Green took an educated guess as to the time of the murder. Maybe he could use it to dislodge a few more memories.
“Did you take the school bus home?”
Robbie nodded.
“And it stopped at the end of your lane?”
Again a nod.
“I want you to try something. Make yourself comfortable. Lean back in the booth, stretch your legs out and let your hands rest in your lap. Good. Now shut your eyes.”
Robbie, red-eyed and shell-shocked, leaned back, and after a moment’s hesitation, his eyelids flickered shut. A flash of fear crossed his brow. Green didn’t blame him, for Robbie knew that something horrible lurked in his mind, and he had no wish to shine too bright a light on it.
“Relax,” Green dropped his voice to a soothing murmur. “This is nothing fancy; it just eliminates distractions. Now I want you to take a deep breath. In slowly, slowly.” He watched the man take a shallow, jerky breath. “Now let it out, slowly, all the way. Let yourself relax, sink into your chair. Now again, deep breath.”
It took Robbie five deep breaths to relax enough to inhale evenly. Green crossed his fingers as he took the next step. He forced his voice to sound mellow, but inside he was quaking. He had used this focussing technique often to help witnesses remember the colour of a bank robber’s eyes or the model of the get-away car, but he’d never tried to recover such a horrific memory from a long-forgotten childhood. He didn’t know whether it would succeed, or whether Robbie would shatter in the process. And if he did shatter, would he, Green, be able to patch him back together again? Would anyone?
Green took his own deep breath. “I want you to picture yourself climbing off the school bus. You’re standing at the end of the long lane beside the mailbox, looking at your house. You can see the barn with its square log sides and its rusty tin roof. Behind it the tall, red brick house...”
Green tried to remember the photo he’d seen in the album. “There’s a clump of yellow daffodils out front, and a big tree beside the house with your tire swing on it. Its limbs are still bare. This is all far away, because you’re still standing on the highway. Can you picture this?”
Robbie nodded.
“Now I want you to start walking down the long lane towards the house. Slowly. You’re tired from the long day, your backpack is heavy, and it bumps against your back.”
Robbie squirmed a little.
“The shed comes into view. What colour is it?”
Robbie wet his lips. Didn’t answer.
“Tell me what you see, Robbie.”
Robbie’s eyes flew open.
“Is it on fire?”
A whispered “No.”
“Do you see people?”
Robbie stared at the tabletop, trembling. Green debated asking him to shut his eyes again, but dared not push further. Whatever Robbie had now, it would have to be enough. Green leaned forward.
“You’ve remembered something, haven’t you?”
“Not the killing,” Robbie repl
ied breathlessly. “But that awful keening while I’m coming down the lane. And...Tom.” Robbie clutched his head. “Tom screaming. Chasing someone. They were both slipping and falling. Tom tackled the other man and grabbed his throat.”
Green reminded himself not to be leading. “Who’s the other person?”
“I...I don’t remember Lawrence very well, so...”
“Then what happened?”
Robbie shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I think a car came along the lane behind me, because I remember someone holding me down on the floor of the back seat. Nothing else.”
Green uttered a silent prayer of thanks. Robbie was in one piece. Pale, stunned, and likely to be revisited by the nightmares of his youth, but intact. He didn’t seem to have witnessed the murder nor seen the bloody aftermath. He had only a disconnected picture of Tom and a vivid image of fire. Yet in those few fragments of memory, two salient facts stood out. First, the father was nowhere to be seen in the scenario Robbie had described. He had seen only Tom and someone who was almost certainly Lawrence. Secondly, Tom had tried to strangle Lawrence, and probably would have succeeded had the car not arrived in the nick of time. On balance, the Tom-as-killer scenario had not fared well in this latest series of revelations.
As if to drive the point home, Robbie grabbed his arm just as Green was getting up to pay the bill. “Does this mean it was Tom? Did that bastard kill our brother and ruin all our lives?”
“I don’t know,” Green replied. Without much conviction.
Nineteen
It was well into the afternoon by the time Green pulled his unmarked Impala up behind the long line of official vehicles in the Boisvert lane. Although technically in charge of the scene, MacPhail had been and gone, leaving instructions that he be called if any human remains turned up. Peter Cole and Lyle Cunningham had cordoned off the entire front yard between the barn and the farmhouse and had already removed most of the gravel fill to a pile at the side of the house. Following standard archeological procedure, the area had been staked and divided with thick twine into grids one metre square to aid in systematizing and recording the search.
A crew of uniformed and Ident officers was fanned out over the grid on their hands and knees, painstakingly lifting the soil with trowels. One of Cunningham’s assistants roamed the scene with cameras draped around his neck, shooting video and still recordings of each section. Cunningham himself was working with Cole in the hole, sifting through the dregs of the gravel. Both men wore overalls and thick gardening gloves, and their cheeks glowed red, whether from exertion or the bitter wind Green wasn’t sure, but they waved cheerfully. Amazing how some people found digging up bones an exhilarating adventure.
The yard was cluttered with tools for digging and cleaning any artifacts they located, but fortunately there was no sign of Jacques Boisvert. Probably still out holding press conferences about police incompetence, Green thought. Spotting him, Sullivan detached himself from a small cluster of officers sitting on the front stoop. As he approached, he looked intense, focussed and on top of his game. Either he’d put his personal disappointment behind him, or he was so caught up in the case that his detective instincts had taken over. Green felt a rush of relief, for he was bursting to discuss the information he’d gathered that morning, and he needed Sullivan at his most pragmatic and astute.
“Any news?” Green left the question as wide open as possible.
“Nothing from the OPP. We’ve got Toronto in on the search too, because by now Tom has probably reached there. He must have filled up on gas in some backwater town and paid cash. Remember, he’s got Robbie’s hundred bucks.”
Green pictured Tom pulling up at some old-fashioned, one-man gas station—the kind where the attendant actually fills the tank—and wondered if he was still unaware of Kyle’s presence in the back. Despite what Sandy had predicted, perhaps the boy had hopped out, or spoken to the attendant, or at least been spotted as he huddled half-frozen in the back.
Sullivan seemed to read his mind. “OPP’s got a region-wide ‘Be on the look-out’ and orders to check every gas station in the target area. If Kyle’s still in the truck, maybe we’ll at least get a sighting as to his condition.”
Green grimaced. And if he isn’t still in the truck, Green thought, where is he? Murdered and dumped in a roadside ditch? Tossed out into the bush to cope for himself? Or fleeing on foot through a rugged countryside of lakes, beaver swamps and forest broken only by vacant cottages and the occasional farm? Fending off the frigid night that had been taken over by dogs, bears, coyotes and maybe even wolves, all on the prowl for food?
Sullivan nodded, worry tightening his own features. “One good thing. At least, he’s a country boy.”
Yeah, Green thought grimly. A country boy whose parents have sheltered him so much that he won’t know even the basics of keeping himself warm. “Have his parents been told that he may have reached Toronto?”
“Oh, yeah. His parents—” Sullivan broke off as they both spotted twin plumes of dust racing down the lane. Sunlight glinted off the bright red truck in the lead, and a moment later Sandy Fitzpatrick skidded to a gravel-spraying stop six feet away. In his wake lumbered a dusty black dump truck with “Scott Construction” stencilled on its cab door. Four people piled out and slammed doors. The McMartins, Sandy and his friend Scott. The four gaped at the digging crews, then stomped over to face down the two detectives. To Green’s surprise, Sandy took up the fight before his mother could get a word in.
“What the hell’s going on, Green! Jeb says you think Kyle’s in danger, and this morning a bunch of cops show up at Scottie here’s dump site with a warrant to search all the fill he took from the yard. And now I see... What the hell are they doing!”
“Searching for something,” Green replied.
“I can see that,” Sandy snapped. “What?”
“Till we have all the facts, I won’t speculate,” Green said. “But we will keep you informed of all developments that relate to Kyle. That I promise.”
Sandy was still staring at the hole in disbelief. “You’re wasting your time. Everything in that shed burned to a cinder years ago.”
Edna shouldered him aside and folded her arms across her chest. “That’s right. Saw it go up myself from over at my place. You should be putting your energies to finding our Kyle, not pawing through some old dirt!”
A shout from one of the workers caught their attention. They all looked up to see an Ident van lurching down the lane. It moved cautiously, as if protecting a precious cargo, but as soon as it stopped, a uniformed officer flung open the rear door and leaped out with an excited cry.
“We found something over at Scott’s place!”
Green snapped an order to the four to stay put, although he knew he was probably wasting his breath. He and Sullivan hurried across the yard, ducked into the rear of the van and slammed it shut. Inside, as their eyes adjusted to the gloom, they made out a large cardboard box, in which lay four objects encased in plastic evidence bags. Green bent closer. Through the rust and the dirt, he was able to make out the head of an axe, a rusty belt buckle, a long brown bone...and half a skull, cracked down the middle.
“Derek!” Green exclaimed, and despite all his advance warning, he felt the strength seep from his legs. “My God, it’s true. They fucking burned him up.”
The rear door of the van cracked open and Sandy peered in, his face the colour of ash. “What!” he gasped. His eyes fixed on the contents of the crate. “What the hell did you find!”
He started to scramble into the van, clawing at the men blocking his way. His mother stepped forward swiftly to grab his arm. “Sandy!” she snapped. “Stay out of it! We have to help Kyle!” She pulled him out, and he thudded against the side of the van, red-faced and panting as if he’d run a marathon. Green signalled Peter Cole over to the van, then jumped out and shut the door firmly behind him. Edna turned to unleash her emotions on him.
“What the dickens is going on! You sai
d Tom wasn’t dangerous! Just wanted to get back home, you said! Now you’re thinking he killed his own brother?”
Privately, Green noted with interest that she had automatically thought Tom the most likely murderer in the family, despite her antipathy for Lawrence. But aloud, he hastened to curb the speculations he had unleashed. “No, Mrs. McMartin, I didn’t say that. Until the experts examine them, we don’t even know what these things are. They could be animal bones and some old junk that was thrown out in that shed long before the fire.”
“You’re digging up the whole yard just for animal bones?” She shook her head, tight-lipped. “I don’t think so, mister.”
Sullivan’s call sign crackled faintly on his radio, and he reached to turn it up. Edna froze in mid-rant and all eyes locked on him. Quickly he unhooked his radio and responded as he walked out of earshot. He kept his face deadpan as he listened, but Green could tell by his rigid focus that the news was important. Green turned back to the group and held up his hands, hoping to defuse one crisis before another was upon them.
“My advice is to go home and let the experts here do their job,” he said. “If and when we have solid information, we will decide our next course of action. Obviously, before we release any information, our first priority will be to ascertain what happened here and to speak with the Pettigrew family.”
Sandy was pacing by the van, his head bowed and his skin now the colour of putty. Phil Scott was whispering to him in a low voice in an attempt to calm him, but Sandy merely wagged his head back and forth. There was an intimacy between the two that suddenly struck Green full force. Holy fuck, he thought. “S”! Of course! It was Sandy whom Derek had been planning to run off with. Sandy whom Norm Pettigrew had found in the shed with him. Sandy who had no pictures of girlfriends or family on his walls, just him and his sports buddy Phil Scott.
For her part, Edna seemed so focussed on Kyle that she didn’t even notice her elder son’s distress as she turned to her husband. “You can go home if you want, Jeb, but if these city cops think I’m taking my eyes off them for one second, they got a thing or two to learn.”
Fifth Son Page 23
