“My name is Riley. I’m an investigator with the law firm of Roche-Desjardins. I would like to ask you some questions about one of your former tenants.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Lawrence Thomason.”
“Huh. What about him?”
“Look, I’m in the lobby. Would you mind if I came to where you’re working?”
“Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll come down, okay?”
“Yes, fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
While I waited I called Nina and provided her with an edited account of my visit to Excel Wood Products, omitting the brief connection I’d made with Irene Stadler. “Where are you now?” Nina said. As I told her, one of the elevator doors opened and a stocky man wearing paint-spattered coveralls emerged. He was in his mid-thirties, blond and blue-eyed and affable looking.
“Mr. Riley?” he said.
“Yes,” I said to him. To Nina, I said, “I’ll call you later.”
I put the phone away and shook hands with the man. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Robert Zimmerman,” he said. “No relation to Bob.”
I smiled, suspecting he’d long ago worn the corners off that line.
“Do you mind if we go outside?” he said. “I’m not supposed to smoke in the building. My wife doesn’t like me smoking at all,” he added, as we went outside and he lit up. “She said your Spanish is terrible.”
“She’s being kind.”
“She thinks mine’s pretty bad, too, but it’s better than her English or her French. We manage. So, how can I help you? Thomason hasn’t lived here in at least a year, year and a half. No one misses him.”
“How long did he live here?”
“A couple of years. There isn’t a whole lot I can tell you about him, except he was kinda creepy. He scared Lita. She said he had ojos muertos. Dead eyes.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“No. And, as far as I know, no mail has arrived for him since he left. Although maybe Mr. Humphrey is just sending it back to the post office. Or throwing it into the trash.”
“Did he leave anything behind when he left?”
“Just some junk that went straight into the dumpster.”
“Do you know if he paid his rent with a cheque?” I asked, thinking I might be able to get a line on him through his bank.
Zimmerman shook his head. “Money order. He
wanted to pay cash, but the management company doesn’t allow tenants to pay cash.”
“Was he friendly with any of his neighbours?”
“I don’t think so. They all thought he was strange. One of them even asked me if I could have him evicted because he didn’t like the way he looked at his wife. Thomason, that is.” He dropped his cigarette into a tall steel receptacle by the door. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to work.
“So none of them is likely to know where he lives now?”
“Probably not.”
Still, it might be worthwhile to speak to some of them, I thought. Given the time of day, though, many of them would be at work.
“Would be all right if I came back later to speak to them?”
“I guess it would be okay,” he said.
I thanked him for his help, told him I’d be in touch, and walked down the block to where I was parked. The phone buzzed as I was getting into the car. Nina.
“I got an address for the landline number you got from Excel Wood Products,” she said.
She gave it to me. It was in a central section of Montreal known as Côte-des-Neiges, part of the same borough in which my mother lived. It translated as “Hill of Snows,” located on the western slope of Mount Royal, the mountain—an ancient volcano, thankfully dormant for the past million years or so—that gave the city its name.
“Cellphone owners’ addresses are harder to track down,” she said. “And I heard from Lionel Keynes. He’ll be back at the office within the hour.”
“Does he know where Terry is?”
“No. He’s been trying to reach her, too.”
“I’ll go out and talk with him, see if I can get a look at her landline phone log and her computer.”
“Pick me up,” she said. “I’ll go along.”
Chapter 20
Nina and I were waiting in the Volvo when Lionel Keynes’s Mazda pulled into Terry’s driveway. Which reminded me …
“Have you heard from the police about Thomason’s car registration?” I asked, as we got out of the car.
“Not yet. Louise said she’d try to light a fire under them.”
Lionel Keynes unlocked the garage office and we followed him inside. The computers were silent, screens dark, but here and there red and green LEDs glowed and pulsed. The message light on one of the phones was blinking. Lionel turned on the lights and went to the alarm panel by the door leading to the house. He was about to enter a code into the panel when he hesitated, fingers hovering over the keypad.
“What is it?”
“The alarm isn’t armed,” he said. “Terry never goes out without arming it. Someone broke in last year and stole the computers. Nearly put us out of business.”
“What if she was just going out for a few minutes?”
I said. “To pick up milk or something.”
“Even then,” he said. “Unless I’m here, of course.”
“But it’s possible she forgot.”
“Well, I suppose it’s possible,” he said. So was life on Mars.
A coldness grew inside me. It was also possible that she’d never left the house. While Nina and he waited in the garage, I went into the house and checked every room, including the basement. Relieved to find no one there, or any sign of foul play, I called to Nina. She went upstairs, and I went back into the kitchen. There were dishes in the drying rack and a bowl of fresh fruit salad in the refrigerator. Nina came down to report that she couldn’t really tell if Terry and Rebecca had packed for a trip. However, Rebecca’s iPad was on her desk, and she never went anywhere without it. Likewise, the old iPod Classic Nina had given her, which contained Rebecca’s music library, was still in its charging cradle next to her computer. More telling, though, Nina said, was that Rebecca’s schoolbag was in her bedroom.
“She’d hardly take her schoolbooks on a road trip,” I said.
“Terry would insist, especially if she was taking her out of school for a few days.”
We returned to the garage. Lionel Keynes looked as though he hadn’t moved a millimetre.
“When was the last time you saw them?” I asked him.
“The day before yesterday,” he said. “I took yesterday off to visit my mother in Ottawa. What’s this about? I don’t understand why Terry didn’t say anything to me, or set the alarm, but I suppose she’s decided to take some time off. She deserves it.”
“I’m sure she does,” I said. “But the timing doesn’t make sense. She was supposed to be waiting to hear from someone. Do you know Marie-Claire Cloutier?”
“I know who she is,” he said.
“Terry evidently got a call from her Monday evening.” I explained what Cloutier had wanted. “She was supposed to call back the next day, after Terry had a chance to speak to Louise Desjardins. Did she?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ms. Desjardins has been trying to get in touch with Terry, but she isn’t answering her cellphone or returning calls.”
“I haven’t been able to reach her, either,” he said. “I was going to call her parents.”
“I spoke to them,” Nina said. “They haven’t heard from her since Sunday evening.”
I asked him if he knew where Lawrence Thomason worked or lived or if he had a landline or cellphone number for him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about him. Except that he doesn’t like me
. The feeling’s mutual.”
“What about Terry? She must have a way of contacting him.”
He shook his head. “Actually, I don’t think she does. She says he’s almost paranoid about privacy. She doesn’t have an email address for him and he always blocks his caller ID when he phones her.”
“I would like to look at the incoming call logs,” I said. “Do you think we could do that?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Is that the only landline? Or is there a separate line for the house?”
“There’s an extension in the house, but there’s only one number.”
“Can you retrieve her voicemail messages?” He nodded. “Put them on speaker, if you don’t mind.”
He logged into the voicemail service and played back three messages. The first two were from Louise Desjardins, the first asking Terry to call her as soon as possible, the second the same message for Lionel. The third was a hang-up.
I pressed the phone’s incoming call memory button and paged through the caller IDs. Over the past three days Terry had received thirty-seven calls, five of which did not include a caller ID name or number, including the most recent hang-up. The majority of identifiable calls came from the 514 and 450 area codes, which covered Montreal and the communities surrounding Montreal Island. The 514 calls included calls from both my loaner cellphones, Nina’s cellphone, and Roche-Desjardins’ switchboard. With the exception of two calls from Terry’s parents, one from a friend of Rebecca’s, and one that Lionel didn’t recognize, he identified the remainder as business-related. Two calls displayed a number only, name unknown. He recognized only one of them. I made a note of the calls he didn’t recognize.
There were three calls from the 613 area code, which covered western Ontario from Cornwall to Ottawa, one from the 618 area code, which covered Quebec City and eastern Quebec, and two from the 802 and 518 area codes, Vermont and eastern upper New York State, respectively. Lionel recognized all as business-related.
I noted the times and dates of the calls that didn’t display a name or a telephone number. The first had been received almost forty-eight hours earlier and the most recent, the voicemail hang-up, just a few hours ago. The remaining three were spread out over the intervening hours. Any one of them, perhaps more than one, could have been from Marie-Claire Cloutier.
While I was checking the phone log, Lionel tried calling Terry’s cellphone. “The call went straight to voicemail,” he said. Nina tried Rebecca’s, with the same result.
“Would you mind checking to see if Terry sent you an email?” I said.
Lionel sat down at a computer and tapped the spacebar. The screen brightened as the machine woke up, prompting him for a password. Nina and I watched over his shoulder as he entered the password and opened his email program. There were a dozen or so new messages in his inbox.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s one from her.” He double-clicked and the message was displayed in a new window.
“Dear Lionel,” it read. “Sorry for the short notice, but Rebecca and I are going to take a few days vacation. We need to get away for awhile. Keep an eye on things. Thanks, Terry.” The signature line read, “Sent from Terry’s iPhone.”
“I thought Terry had a Blackberry,” Nina said. “When did she get an iPhone?”
“A couple of months ago,” Lionel said. “They were gifts from Lawrence Thomason.”
“They?” Nina said.
“He gave one to Rebecca, too. Terry tried to refuse them, but he insisted.” He was staring at the screen, re-reading the email. “Um … ?”
“What?” I said.
“There’s something not right about it,” he said. “I—I don’t think Terry wrote it.”
I read it again; nothing struck me as unusual. “What makes you think she didn’t write it?”
“Well,” he said. “This may sound silly, but she’s a stickler for proper grammar in emails. In ‘days vacation’, ‘days’ should have an apostrophe. And one of her pet peeves is the improper use of ‘awhile.’ When preceded by ‘for’ it should be two words: ‘for … a … while.’”
“Pretty thin,” I said. “It’s not easy to type on those little keyboards.”
“Another thing. She’d never start an email to me with ‘Dear Lionel.’ Just my name, sometimes not even that. The only people she addresses as ‘dear such and such’ are the people who send us their manuscripts.” He shook his head. “She didn’t write this.”
“You’re sure?” Nina said.
“Pretty sure, yes,” he said, with less certainty.
So who wrote it? I wondered. I didn’t like the answer that sidled into my consciousness.
I asked Lionel to check Terry’s computer to see if she might have Lawrence Thomason’s contact information after all. He moved to another computer. She didn’t.
“What about the clients Thomason brought? Maybe they could tell us something about him.”
“I don’t think Terry kept their contact information,” he said. “The books were pretty bad and we don’t keep manuscripts we don’t intend to publish, even electronically.”
“Could you check?”
He moved to a third computer, logged in, and started rummaging through directories. After a few minutes, he gave up. “Sorry. It looks like she trashed them.”
“Did she empty the trash?” Nina asked.
He checked. She had. Nor was he able to find them on the backup drives.
“All your computers are Macs,” Nina said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know if Terry has an iCloud account?”
“I think so, yes. Why?”
“Maybe she enabled the Find My iPhone feature for her and Rebecca’s iPhones.”
Lionel returned to Terry’s computer, but after poking around for a minute said, “It doesn’t look like it. Anyway, it wouldn’t work if the phones were turned off, would it?”
“I suppose not,” Nina said.
I gave him a card with my cellphone number on the back and asked him if he would please call me, Nina or Louise Desjardins if he heard from Terry or if she came home. He said he would. Nina thanked him for his help, and she and I went out to the car. As we were getting in, Nina’s phone rang.
“Louise,” Nina said, for my sake. “What’s up?” She listened for a moment, then said, “You’re kidding. Okay, thanks.” She disconnected, dropped the phone into her purse. “Guess who Thomason’s car is registered to.”
“Thomason?” I said, knowing I must be wrong.
“Ehhhh,” Nina rasped, mimicking a game-show buzzer. “Wrong. The correct answer is Terry. Christ, can you believe it? She leased the guy a goddamned BMW.”
“I should be surprised,” I said. “But I’m not. He’s very good at manipulating people. He had everyone at Excel Wood Products completely bamboozled into believing he was the best salesman they’d ever seen, a true rainmaker.”
I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in Terry. However, she herself had told me that, according to her reading, sociopaths exuded plausibility, often fooling even therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who weren’t familiar with their ways and wiles. Was Thomason a sociopath? I wasn’t qualified to judge, but everything I had learned about him pointed in that direction.
I’d been wrong. Even once burned by Chaz Brandt, and forewarned by the books she’d read, Terry was not immune to Thomason’s manipulation, whether he was a sociopath or just a run-of-the-mill con man.
“Where to now?” Nina said.
“We need to talk to Terry’s parents. And her brother.”
“I’ve talked to her parents,” Nina said. “She didn’t tell them where she was going. Zach and Terry don’t talk much. He was living at the country house. I don’t know where he’s living now.”
“Nevertheless, we should talk to them. It’s possible they’re
lying, that they’ve also been taken in by
Thomason.”
Chapter 21
My memories of Ronald and Clare Jardine were vague. They’d been cool to the scruffy, directionless man with whom their only daughter was cohabiting, but they’d seemed nice enough, if a bit colourless. My memories of Terry’s brother Zach were stronger. Five years older than Terry, he’d been arrogant and condescending, lecturing his parents, Terry, and me about the evils of American capitalist imperialism and corporate globalization, while in the same breath complaining that his supervisor at the electronics manufacturing firm for which he worked was an ass-kissing sycophant who refused to recommend him for promotion to a position—and salary—commensurate, in his opinion, with his education and abilities. He’d taken offence when I’d suggested that perhaps an attitude adjustment would improve his chances, which had made Terry laugh.
Terry’s parents still lived in the same modest Beaconsfield bungalow they’d lived in when Terry and I had been together. Terry’s father had been a Beaconsfield municipal employee, since retired, and her mother had taught math or something at John Rennie High School in
Pointe-Claire. Still did, Nina told me as she rang the doorbell. A moment later the door was opened by a thickset, greying man three inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier and a couple of years older than I was.
“Hello, Zach,” Nina said.
“Nina, right?” Zach Jardine said. “You work for Terry’s lawyer.”
“That’s right,” Nina said.
He looked at me. “Do I know you? You look kind of familiar.”
“Maybe you don’t remember me,” I said. “I was a friend of Terry’s twenty years ago. Riley?”
“Riley,” Zach Jardine said, shaking my hand. “Hell yeah, I remember you. How you doing?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Have you spoken to Terry recently?” Nina asked.
Zach shook his head. “Not for a while. My fault. When the bank foreclosed on the lake house, I was a total prick about it. I blamed her for losing it, even though I knew it wasn’t her fault. I haven’t had the guts to call her and apologize.” Even after three years?
The Evil That Men Do Page 16
