“You ride up front with me. Sandy, get in back with Brian and the least sign of trouble, he handcuffs you to the door. And both of you, do exactly what we tell you!”
They piled into the car, which Green gunned ahead before he’d even closed his door. Rocks and potholes thudded the bottom of the car and branches raked its sides as they rocketed down the lane. The smaller, nimbler Grand Am was a pinpoint of red that vanished around curves and over hills in the distance.
“What the fuck is she doing!” Tom cried, hanging on to the dash. “She can’t possibly escape!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sandy snapped. “It’s worth the risk. She knows Kyle can’t swim, but she’s a strong swimmer. I know her! She figures she has an outside chance, and if not...”
Fighting the wheel to keep the car in control, Green didn’t dare take his eyes off the road. “If not, what?”
“She’ll kill herself before she faces the humiliation!”
Green glanced at Tom. “And there’s a boat launch up ahead?”
Tom nodded grimly. Green had a split second to make a decision. Either to stop the chase so they didn’t drive her into the water, or to speed up so they could catch her before she did. Or at least before Kyle sank beneath the surface. Green held his breath, trying to think.
“Go faster, Mike,” said Sullivan in his soft, calm voice. Gratitude flooded through Green at his intuitive good sense. Green tromped on the gas pedal, ripping up grass and stones beneath the wheels as the cruiser surged ahead. The red lights flicked out of sight behind a curve just ahead. Seconds later, Green skidded around the curve, and suddenly a huge drop yawned before them as the road plunged down the hill to the glistening black expanse of the lake. In the nanosecond before he reacted, Green saw a massive splash as the Grand Am hit the water. Green slammed on the cruiser’s brakes, hurtling it sideways down the hill. The big vehicle rocked and bucked as he fought to straighten it, but he was powerless. All around him, glass exploded and metal shrieked.
“It’s going to roll!” someone shouted. Green hung on as they continued their downward descent, clipping rocks and trees but miraculously staying upright. The car finally shuddered to a stop against a tree at the bottom of the hill. Ahead in the oblique beam of the cruiser’s headlights, they could see the roof of the Grand Am slipping out of sight.
Green flung himself against his door, but it wouldn’t budge. Tom was first out of the car, dragging himself headfirst through his broken window. Without a second thought, Green followed him, barely feeling the shards of glass that tore at his hands. He dashed to get the emergency equipment out of the trunk. Sullivan was already out of the car and heading to the water’s edge when Tom dove headlong into the chilly water. Green pried open the trunk, grabbed a coil of rope and yelled to Sullivan.
“I’ll make a noose and stay on shore to help you pull them out.”
Barely pausing to nod, Sullivan kicked off his shoes, took two giant steps and plunged into the lake. Seconds ticked by as Green stared at the roiling surface. Tom and Sullivan surfaced about thirty feet from shore, gasping and shaking their heads. Sandy hobbled down from the car, nursing his knee. He watched them dive again, then peeled off his boots.
“You stay here,” Green snapped.
“Make me!” Sandy shouted, wading out towards the driver’s side of the sunken car. Soon Green was alone on shore, scanning the surface. Water splashed and churned, then Tom popped up again, sputtering and flaying about. “Help me! Take him!”
Green cursed his inner city inadequacy. He’d never taken swimming lessons and could count on one hand the number of times he’d been in a lake beyond his waist. Fuck it, the dog paddle will have to do, he thought as he plunged out into the water and tossed the rope to Tom, who was hauling something large and unwieldy. Tom wrestled the loop around Kyle’s torso and together they dragged the unconscious boy to shore. Green checked his airways, then rolled him rapidly onto his stomach and pressed down on his back, forcing the water out of his lungs.
“I’ll look for blankets,” gasped Tom as he scrambled dripping and shivering up to the car.
Once Green was satisfied Kyle’s lungs were clear, he rolled him onto his back and began CPR. Mechanically, methodically, he counted, dredging his memory for skills he’d never had to use beyond the classroom.
Sandy and Sullivan surfaced yet again, splashing and gasping. Sandy screamed to Tom for the rope.
“Forget it,” Tom shouted from the car. “She’s been down too long.”
“Throw the fucking rope!” Sandy yelled.
Tom came back with a blanket and bent to cover Kyle before retrieving the rope and reluctantly helping the two others tow Edna’s inert weight to shore. Once they’d tugged her half out of the water and splayed her body on the muddy ground, Sullivan sprinted up to the cruiser to radio for help. Green heard him asking for two ambulances and as many paramedics as they could muster.
After what seemed an eternity, he felt Kyle’s chest heave beneath his hands as the boy spasmed in a cough. Green stopped CPR and rolled him on his side, watching through a film of grateful tears as Kyle coughed and retched weakly back to life.
Sandy was bent over his mother, frantically trying to do CPR. Green gestured to Tom. “Take care of Kyle for me while I help Sandy.”
“Forget it!” Tom snapped as he cradled Kyle against him gingerly. “Let the bitch die!”
Sandy whirled on him, tears mingling with the water dripping down his face. “I’m not going to let her fucking die! She’s going to pay!”
* * *
It was four in the morning before all the crises had been contained, the charges sorted out, and the proper paperwork completed. Green had refrained from demanding to know why the OPP had taken so long to arrive, and they in kind had not mentioned his multiple violations of procedure that had placed himself, a fellow officer and four civilians in serious jeopardy. The police cruiser was still lodged against the tree at the bottom of the hill, an expense and complication that would thrill Barbara Devine when she assumed her post Monday morning.
Still, from the brass’s perspective, even though the methods weren’t pretty, the end result would sound good on the morning news. No one had died, and the bad people had been arrested. Edna and Kyle McMartin had been taken to Belleville General Hospital, where Edna had regained consciousness and was already screaming police incompetence, suggesting that prolonged oxygen deprivation had not altered her brain one bit. The cold water was the saving grace, the doctors intoned, but Green suspected it was her stubborn refusal to admit defeat. She would need every ounce of that in the months ahead, if he had any say in the matter.
After a thorough check-up, a hot meal and a good night’s sleep, Kyle was set to be discharged from hospital in the morning into the care of his grateful but very shaken father. Sandy had been checked over at the medical centre in Madoc and given a clean bill of health, and after some consideration, Green and Sullivan had declined to press charges. Under the circumstances, Sandy had paid dearly enough.
“I didn’t even know that she knew I was gay,” he said as he and the two detectives waited at the Madoc OPP station for Jeb McMartin to arrive. Sandy paced the reception area, exhausted but too wound up to sit. “She must have found our notes.”
“Or Derek’s father told her,” Green replied. “He wanted you two stopped as well.”
“Derek was my first lover. Knowing Mom, she’d think it was all his fault. Her baby, corrupted by a depraved pervert.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Poor mother. Two flawed failures for sons, like some kind of divine punishment. Over the years, she’s kept pushing women on me. What did she think? That I could just switch it off if a good enough woman came along?”
“Probably.”
“And Lawrence!” Sandy exclaimed, his emotions flooding out. “Poor innocent Lawrence comes home looking for a little home comfort—after all those years in the asylum for a crime she committed!—and what does he get? His worst nightmare! The witch from hell! You kn
ow, she actually showed the church that afternoon, because I was off duck hunting when the client came along. That’s probably when she spotted him.” He clenched his fists, paced faster. “I knew she was a hard woman, but I never believed her heartlessness ran so deep. I hope you can nail her!”
Green assured him they’d do their best, but privately, once Sandy had left, Sullivan shook his head doubtfully. The two of them slumped wearily over cups of coffee.
“We don’t have much to nail her on,” Sullivan said. “Even on the attempted murder of Kyle, it’s going to be hard to get past reasonable doubt. She can just say some strange car chased her into the lake. You forgot to turn the goddamn siren on, you know. As for either of the Pettigrew murders, all we have are the confused reports of a couple of boys and one bloody fingerprint that we can’t really link to Derek’s death. Unless forensics gets really lucky with the axe and we can get some usable blood from it to match to the blood on the fingerprint.”
Axe! Green sat up as a memory leaped into his mind. All pain evaporated. Pulling out his cell phone, he dialled home. The phone rang and rang before Sharon’s groggy voice came through. Belatedly he glanced at his watch. Four a.m.
“Sorry, honey,” he said. He’d already given her a full report earlier in the night, and he suspected she might have only just managed to fall asleep. “Nothing’s wrong,” he added hastily. “I’m fine, but I have a question to ask Hannah.”
To her credit, Sharon didn’t protest or demand answers, but simply went to wake his daughter up. There was a long delay, during which Sullivan watched him curiously, before the phone picked up again.
“What?” came his daughter’s surly voice.
“Hi, honey, I thought you might like to know Kyle is safe.”
“I heard. Lucky for you.”
He felt a flare of anger. No “how are you, Dad? I heard you were in an accident.” How long was she going to make him pay? He glanced at Sullivan, whose children had been all over him when he called, clamouring to know about the chase. But now Sullivan was eyeing him, and his mystified look brought Green back to the issue at hand.
“I have a question about what Kyle told you in the barn.”
“I already told you everything.”
“But you said it was all jumbled up and hard to connect. Did he say anything about the bad person who was chasing the man who died? Did that person have anything in their hand?”
“What the hell?”
“Think, honey.”
“No. He was talking about bells. He said something was too dangerous and he said bad boy and get in trouble and no wood, and fall—”
“No what?” Green scrambled to make the connections to what the boy might have seen.
“No wood. He said that several times.”
Bingo, Green thought, his spirits soaring. In the mind of a >child, what use was an axe with no wood? “Thanks a million, honey! I love you! Go back to bed.”
He waited until seven o’clock before calling Cunningham, for he wanted the man wide awake. “I’ve got a challenge you’re going to love, Cunny. I want you to make up a life size dummy of Lawrence Pettigrew—same height, same weight distribution—and I want you to take it to the church tower. There’s a rusty old axe in the sanctuary I want you to test for prints. Then I want you to take this dummy up to the top and experiment with pushing it over the edge. Backward, forward, sit it on top, make it jump.”
Cunningham was laughing. “You want a ring-side seat for this?”
“Absolutely. I want to see what makes it land on its stomach with its head towards the tower. I’m betting it’s when the dummy’s back is to the wall and someone else pushes its chest back and flips it over the wall.”
When he’d hung up, Green turned to Sullivan triumphantly. “That’s how we’re going to nail her, Brian!”
“She’s not strong enough to push him over.”
“She didn’t have to. She had the axe, and when she came at him, he backed up so far over the wall that he flipped over. Some kid in the square heard him screaming ‘get away, get away’. He was terrified. To him, remembering the last time he’d seen her with an axe, she must have seemed like the devil incarnate.”
Green could tell from Sullivan’s expression that he didn’t share Green’s optimism, but it didn’t matter. The evidence might be circumstantial, just one small piece in the theory they would lay in front of the jury, but it gave him something to work on. Some hope of exacting a small measure of justice for all the victims in this case.
Of all those victims, Green was most worried about Tom, whom they had to leave in the custody of the OPP after his clearance by the Medical Centre. Peters would be accompanying him back to Ottawa to face multiple charges, once proper transportation could be arranged. As the final act of his command, Jules seemed hellbent on making sure someone shouldered the blame for the crisis, and right now his sights were set on Tom. Whose shoulders were pretty frail already.
While Sullivan arranged the loan of an OPP vehicle to get himself and Green back to Ottawa, Green wandered back to the lock-up to give Tom a final word of encouragement. He had to wait five minutes in the interview room before the door opened and Tom shuffled in, his hands cuffed and a grey blanket draped around his shoulders. His eyes were bruised and puffy as if he’d been physically battered, and he barely acknowledged Green as he sank into a chair.
Green instructed the OPP officer to remove the cuffs and wait outside. Once they were alone, Green pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and laid one on the table.
“Thought you could use one of these.”
Tom shrugged. “No smoking allowed.”
“Take it.”
Tom massaged his wrist, then picked up the cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. It trembled as Green extended a light.
“Thanks.”
Green watched the ravaged man, who barely had the energy for his nicotine fix. Green didn’t know what to say or even why he had come. Just that someone had to come.
“I’m going to do everything I can, Tom.”
Tom squinted through smoke. “To nail her?”
“That too. But I meant to help you.”
Tom stared at the table a long time, not smoking, not moving. “How was I supposed to know?” he said finally. “I came home, found Lawrence in the shed holding Derek in his arms. Blood all over him, this great fucking axe at his side. I tried to get him away, but he kept saying he had to save Derek from the devil.” He tried to raise his cigarette to his lips, but it dropped from his fingers. Green rescued it and held it while Tom fought a silent war with his pain. “I damn near killed him on the spot, but Mom and Dad came along. He wouldn’t stop screaming. We locked him up, and he screamed the whole night. Mom and Dad fucking tied him up to drive him to Brockville, left Benji and me to clean up the mess.”
Tom began to tremble all over, his eyes glassy with tears. He blew out a shaky breath and sucked in another. “Oo-h boy. Ain’t never thought about this without a few stiff ones along for the ride. Benji and me were supposed to burn Derek up with the place, but we couldn’t stand the idea. I mean, him curling up like a steak on a barbeque. We laid him out nice in the ground underneath before we burned the shed down.”
Green struggled to find something rational to say. “Why didn’t someone in the family call the police?”
“Dad said that wouldn’t bring Derek back, only blow the whole thing up in the papers and all. Said Lawrence was sick and belonged in a hospital. I guess I should’ve fought the old man on that one, but he kept saying it must’ve been some kinda God’s will. Derek’s punishment. I never knew what the hell that meant, till now.”
Green felt the horror like a physical blow to the stomach, and he fought to draw breath. “Jesus,” was all he managed.
“Yeah. Jesus. He figured we’d get rid of it all. All the sins, all the ugly little secrets.” Tom took the forgotten cigarette from Green’s fingers and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. “Benji never did get away fro
m the nightmares. Till he took the only way out he could think of. And Lawrence... Fuck, look what we did to that poor kid. He could’ve had some kind of life, with the drugs there are now and us sticking by him.”
Green regained his professional footing with an effort. “He didn’t have a bad life in St. Lawrence, Tom. He did have a family of sorts.”
Tom didn’t seem to hear. He twirled the cigarette in his hand. “I was so mean to him when he was a kid. He was a nice little kid, kinda cute, you know? But he should’ve been protected, like Kyle. But you can’t go back, eh? Even the old cottage ain’t the same no more.” He shrugged as if disappointment was second nature to him. “Me and Robbie figured we’d bury him out in the village in that little graveyard by the church. Can’t think of much else I can do to make it up to him.”
It was a nice idea, Green told him, to give him something to hold on to in the days ahead. After the OPP officer led Tom back to his cell, Green sat alone in the interview room for almost five minutes, gathering the courage to get up.
On the long drive back into the city, the two detectives picked over the case in a desultory fashion, trying to gain their own sense of equilibrium with the events of the past few days. But their hearts weren’t in it, their bodies ached and their minds were too foggy for creative thought. Finally Green tilted his seat back and shut his eyes, profoundly weary. Even with two strong painkillers, every muscle in his body ached, and his bandaged hands throbbed.
“Jesus, what a night,” he murmured. “I’m getting too soft for this kind of thing.”
Sullivan glanced at him. “You violated just about every rule in the book, you know. Luckily, they’ll never know the half of them.”
Green opened his eyes. Smiled. There was a ring of the old warmth in Sullivan’s tone, from the days when they were partners. “And luckily, you were right there to fix them, eh?”
Fifth Son Page 27
