Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

  Weiss stopped rocking but didn’t raise his head. Green waited, feeling the seconds tick by in the dank, ill-lit stairwell. Finally, Weiss heaved a deep, shuddering sigh and spoke through his hands.

  “She dropped me at this bar and told me to meet her at the car by the hotel where the bus station was. There were only twelve places to canvass—the hotel, three shitty restaurants, a fast food joint, a convenience store, a couple of offices and banks. I was done my six in about half an hour, so I found the car and waited outside it for her to show up.”

  “Why didn’t you go look for her?”

  He scrubbed his face and lifted his head. His voice grew stronger. “She didn’t want me to blow her cover.”

  “Her cover?”

  “Yeah, we were supposed to be looking for a lost friend. In my case my girlfriend, in hers just an old friend.”

  “You mean you didn’t identify yourselves as police officers?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Green muttered.

  “Yeah.” Weiss pressed his eyes closed. “God, am I fucked.”

  “You’re fucked? Sue Peters may be dead!”

  “I know, and believe me, if I could trade places with her, I would.”

  “Too easy, Weiss. Go on. You were waiting at the car, and . . . ?”

  “When over an hour passed, I started to get worried. So I went to look for her, and she wasn’t in any of the places. But the bartender in the first place said her partner had called to meet her outside, so she’d left.”

  “The bartender said her partner called? So he knew she was a cop?”

  “Yeah, apparently. Anyway—”

  “Did you tell the Petawawa police about that supposed phone call? They can check it out.”

  He hesitated. “I don’t remember. I think I told them pretty well what I’ve told you. Anyway, I went back to the car and that’s when I noticed the smell of pepper spray. I followed it till I found her in the warehouse about a hundred feet from the car.”

  The OPP had already reported finding an empty cannister of pepper spray near Peters’ body, but no other weapons. Her Glock had been found stashed in her car. Green pictured the young woman fending off her attacker with the only weapon at her disposal. At least the silly fool had had that; otherwise she’d be dead.

  “Did you see anyone else in the vicinity? Or leaving the area?”

  Weiss shook his head. “The whole place was dead. And to be honest, once I found Sue, all I could think of was the 911 call. And afterwards, how she was lying there bleeding all that time I was waiting at the car. Christ, I’m such a moron.”

  Green already knew that the OPP’s preliminary street canvass of the area around the hotel had yielded nothing. Ridiculous, Green thought, that a woman could be assaulted at three o’clock on a workday afternoon, near the central crossroads of the town, and no one heard or saw a thing.

  “We’ll send our own guys up there tomorrow,” Green said, then glanced at his watch. Two a.m. “Well, at first light. We’ll be working closely with the local OPP, and you can rest assured we’ll comb every inch of the area and interview everyone who passes through that part of town.”

  Privately, Green doubted the attacker had been careless enough to leave them much to go on. He didn’t for one minute believe this was an opportunistic assault with a sexual intent. This was Patricia’s killer; a smart, calculating man who had planned his attack with care. He had deliberately targeted an investigating cop. Either he had phoned the bartender once he knew Sue Peters was in the bar, or the bartender had phoned him with the tip. But there were two nagging questions about the whole scenario. One, was Jeff Weiss telling the truth?

  And two, if he was, why hadn’t the killer targeted him too?

  When Green arrived back at the waiting room, most of the police officers had finally drifted away to work or to sleep. A couple had stayed to keep Mark Peters company during his vigil, and one detective sat beside Gibbs, who was dozing. He signalled Green to one side and asked if it was true that Ottawa was to have no part in the investigation. Appalled, Green managed a hasty assurance to the contrary before ducking outside to put in a call to the station.

  Gaetan Larocque’s voice gave him away before he’d even said two words. He cleared his throat anxiously. “The agreement we have is that the OPP handles the case up there, sir. It’s their jurisdiction.”

  “And who the fuck agreed—” Green stopped himself as the answer came to him. Barbara Devine, of course, the queen of org charts and rules. Of form over substance every time. He forced himself to sound reasonable. “Okay, I’ll fix that in the morning. Meanwhile you can start freeing up some officers—”

  “We don’t have the experienced manpower available right now, sir. Not to do a really thorough job. That’s what Superintendent Devine explained.”

  We don’t have the manpower available to investigate an assault on one of our own officers? Green thought, barely believing what he was hearing. He wanted to throttle the woman. How could she even think that, let alone justify it! Never mind that it was true, that the squad was stretched beyond reason by the three murders already on its plate. When it came to one of their own, everybody would do double duty without complaint.

  But this was his problem, not Larocque’s, so Green held his tongue until he could get rid of the man. Marshalling his arguments, he punched in Devine’s extension and listened as it rang through the empty room. With each ring, his outrage mounted, so that by the time her voice mail kicked in, he nearly hurled his cellphone against the wall.

  “Barbara,” he said tersely. “No way we’re staying out of the Petawawa investigation, even if I go up there myself on my own time!”

  Shoving his cellphone into his pocket, he went back inside the hospital. Constable Weiss had not returned to the waiting room, but Bob Gibbs was awake. He rose and lurched towards Green at a clumsy shuffle, as if the effort to coordinate his gangly limbs was now beyond him.

  “Any news about catching the bastard? Sir?”

  Green tried to sound encouraging. “Everyone’s working on it. It’s early yet. Any news here?”

  “Ident was in to take samples from under her fingernails. They were pretty clean, Sergeant Paquette said, but we need only one hair or a few skin cells to get DNA. And the g-gynaecologist was in to check for sexual . . .” Gibbs broke off, his composure cracking at the thought. He struggled on. “Whoever assaulted her didn’t . . . There were no signs of . . .” Speech deserted him again, and he gulped for breath.

  “That’s good,” Green interjected, hoping to forestall a complete collapse. “This had nothing to do with sexual assault.”

  Wordlessly, Gibbs bobbed his head up and down. Then his gaze shifted behind Green, and his face lit with relief. Green turned to see Brian Sullivan framed in the doorway. The big detective was bleary-eyed and dressed in a rumpled suit as if he’d come straight off a twelve-hour shift. His gaze was fixed on Gibbs, and his expression was grave. Gibbs walked straight to him, and without a word, Sullivan engulfed him in a powerful embrace. Over Gibbs’s shoulder, his eyes met Green’s.

  “Is she dead?” he mouthed.

  Green shook his head, and Sullivan tightened his grip. “She’ll make it, Bob. Giving up is not in Peters’ repertoire, you know that.”

  Gibbs drew back, his eyes red. When he raised his fist to dry them surreptitiously, Sullivan pretended not to notice. He clapped his broad hand on Green’s shoulder. “Good to see you, Mike.”

  “I’m glad you came.” Green fought an unexpected lump in his own throat. As always, his old friend filled the room with hope and confidence. God, he’d missed the man!

  “How is she?”

  Green glanced at Gibbs, who had slumped back into his chair. He looked drained. Beyond talk. “I could use a coffee. Let’s go downstairs.”

  Taking a corner table in the completely deserted hospital cafeteria, Green gave Sullivan the highlights of Peters’ case. The big man stretched his long legs out and listened
without interruption, his eyes fixed on a distant point in space. It felt just like old times when they were partners in Major Crimes. In the face of Sullivan’s calm pragmatism, Green felt the ropes of tension in his gut slowly loosen, releasing feelings he had kept under tight lock. He twirled his coffee cup restlessly.

  “The worst part of it is that I never really liked the kid.”

  “She was a royal pain in the ass,” Sullivan replied.

  “Yeah. But maybe I didn’t protect her enough, didn’t consider her safety enough, because I didn’t like her.”

  “That’s bullshit, Mike. You weren’t even in town when she took off to Petawawa.”

  “But maybe I should have been. Bottom line, the kid’s hanging by a thread, and we’re stretched so thin that Devine has relinquished the whole investigation up there to the OPP. I told her I’d go up and do the damn case myself.”

  A slow smile twitched across Sullivan’s lips. “I might have an offer neither she nor the Chief can refuse.”

  Green cocked his head. After twenty years on the streets together, he knew Sullivan inside out. Knew what that smile meant, yet he barely let himself hope.

  “I’m going crazy in Strategic Planning, Mike. I could ask my Inspector for a temporary assignment back to Major Crimes, just to plug your holes in manpower and provide some experience on the ground. Under the circumstances, the brass would be crazy to refuse.” His blue eyes twinkled. “That is, if you’d like some company working the streets of Petawawa.”

  FIFTEEN

  Sullivan was already stationed outside Green’s office when Green arrived the next morning. The two men had finally left the hospital at three in the morning, after deciding that Sue Peters would be better served by their being rested and ready to work on her behalf in the morning rather than maintaining a hospital vigil through the dead of night.

  Green had managed only three hours of restless sleep before thoughts of the case drove him back to the office, and he was surprised to find Sullivan there ahead of him, sporting a fresh shave and a spotless suit. Green noted that in the past six months he had added a few grey hairs to his sandy blond crewcut and a pound or two to his footballer frame, but his blue eyes crinkled with an excitement Green hadn’t seen in years. Before the grind of Major Crimes and the disappointments of lost promotions had worn him down.

  Inside the office, Sullivan propped his size thirteen feet on the corner of Green’s desk as if he’d never been away. “It’s all stamped and approved, all the way up to the Deputy Chief,” he announced.

  “When do you begin?”

  “This instant. Fill me in on the case she was investigating.”

  It took Green half an hour to sketch the details of the Patricia Ross case and Peters’ role in it, ending with a summary of his own confrontation with Jeff Weiss. As he spoke, his doubts of last night came back to him. He shook his head back and forth. “Something is funny about that guy. I’m not sure what it is. He was hanging around the first morning when we found the body, and Gibbs says he asked to be assigned to the case. He’s a cocky bastard, and I thought he was just looking for a way up the ladder, but after his utter screw-up with Peters . . .”

  “He’s not a Major Crimes detective, Mike. Maybe he thought this was the way we work.”

  “They were in a strange town, going into sleazy bars, tracking a murderer, for God’s sake. Did he have to be a rocket scientist?”

  “Peters didn’t see a problem.”

  “Well, Peters is . . .” Green broke off, remembering the young woman clinging to life by nothing but a few hundred sutures. He left his harsh words unsaid.

  “Yeah,” Sullivan agreed. “So what are you thinking, Mike? That this Weiss guy is somehow implicated? That he left her to get killed? Why?”

  Green shrugged. “I’m not thinking anything. I just wonder who the hell is this guy? What’s his background?”

  Sullivan’s eyes narrowed. “So you want us to investigate one of our own?”

  “Quietly. Unofficially. Nose around, maybe have a peek at his file.”

  Sullivan sat thinking a moment, his broad face deadpan. “Unofficially. Sure, we’ll just add that to the list. Find out what Peters discovered in Petawawa, get the goods on the peacekeepers Oliver and MacDonald served with in Yugoslavia, figure out the whole Halifax connection and how it fits in with Patricia Ross’s death—”

  “Which means finding out who she had a drink with here in Ottawa. Gibbs was working on that.”

  “Jeez, Mike. This case has more tentacles than an octopus!”

  Green nodded. “And it’s hard to know which tentacle to grab first, especially now that Peters and probably Gibbs are out of commission. Anyway, I can do the inquiry into Constable Weiss more easily than you. I’ll just have a casual chat with his staff sergeant.”

  “Don’t underestimate Gibbsie. You know what he’s like when he’s on a mission, and right now I’d lay odds he’ll turn over every rock to catch the bastard who did this to Sue.” He reached across with his foot and nudged Green’s door open wide enough for them to see out into the squad room. Sure enough, Gibbs was bent over his computer, his eyes fixed on the screen. His suit was rumpled, and his features drooped with fatigue, but his fingers were flying over the keyboard.

  After a moment, he rose, loped over to the printer to retrieve a sheaf of papers and headed for Green’s office. The sight of Sullivan in the guest chair stopped him at the door. When Green explained Sullivan’s special assignment to help with the Petawawa angle of the case, Gibbs looked overwhelmingly relieved. He swallowed convulsively, and his Adam’s apple jumped as he struggled for words. Sullivan rescued him.

  “What have you got, Bob?” he asked, nodding to the papers in his hand.

  Gibbs plunked the printouts down on Green’s desk. “Some information from Captain Ulrich at National Defence, sir. At least what he has so far. Photos of Colonel Hamm and Sergeant Sawranchuk, and details on some of the guys in his section. Three are still with the Princess Pats in Edmonton, two are overseas in Kandahar, and two are back in the reserves, going to university.”

  “Where?”

  Gibbs flipped through the papers. “One at Queens, one at Memorial in Newfoundland.”

  Which is a short hop to Halifax, but a long way from Ottawa, Green thought. “Well, Kingston is less than a two hour drive, so the Queens guy could easily do a round trip to Ottawa or Petawawa in a day. Ask Ulrich to send us the Queens guy’s photo ASAP, and we’ll send the three photos down to Kate McGrath in Halifax for her to show around.”

  “And I’ll take the three up with me to Petawawa,” Sullivan said. “Sue Peters obviously stirred up someone when she was blundering around in the bars.” He looked thoughtful. “Anything useful in her notebook?”

  Gibbs jerked back as if hit by an electric shock. “I forgot about that! Nobody’s seen it. It wasn’t in her personal effects when they handed them over to us.”

  Green’s temper flared. A missing notebook should have been a major red flag to the investigators on the scene. The look of disbelief on Sullivan’s face mirrored his own, but the big detective was diplomatic. “Get them to keep looking. Meanwhile, we’d better get everything we can about her activities from that constable who was with her.”

  Which will be fuck-all, Green thought, since the idiot wasn’t with her when she was traipsing around the bars. Suddenly a thought struck him.

  He leaned forward, his instincts screaming. “The notebook was probably what the killer was after all along! He was tracking her movements in Petawawa and realized she’d learned something to make her a threat.” He swung on Gibbs. “Who knew she was up there?”

  Gibbs scrunched up his face in an effort to concentrate through his exhaustion and fear. He counted on his fingers. “The base commander, Colonel Lyttle. The military police captain and the OPP detachment commander—”

  “And all their men, of course,” Green added impatiently. “It would have been part of their daily briefing.”

 
; Gibbs nodded bleakly. “And C-Colonel Hamm. That’s it, I think. Besides us.”

  “And who among us?” Green said quietly.

  Gibbs stared at him in uncomprehending silence for a moment. “My-myself. The staff sergeant, a couple of guys on the squad.”

  “And Constable Weiss.”

  “Well—yes. Constable Weiss.”

  July 20, 1993. On some fucking road somewhere in Croatia.

  We’re stuck at another roadblock while the CO argues with another drunken militia leader who thinks he’s a general. This has been the worst day, bar none, of the whole tour. I’d only been back from leave two days when Sarge wakes us all up at four a.m. “We’re moving out, pack all your kit, because nobody knows where the hell we’re going or when we’ll be back.” So I asked if we could take Fundy and Sarge thinks we can squeeze her in the APC, but the Hammer says not a chance. Can’t be tripping over a dog when we’re trying to get out in a hurry, and she might bark when we’re trying to sneak through somewhere. The whole camp loves her and all, but rules are rules. Mahir says he’ll take her, and I figured he’d take good care of her.

  She must have been distracted by all the activity, because when the APCs started pulling out, she starts running after us. Mahir is calling her but she cuts a corner and doesn’t see the fucking mine. Blew her twenty feet at least. I can see she’s still alive, but the Hammer won’t let me go to her. “We’re on the road, soldier, he says, we’re in formation and we’ve got twenty-four hours to get to our destination.” Wherever the fuck that is.

  So the last thing I see is Mahir carrying her towards his house, and I’ll probably never know what happened to her. She was a brave little soldier, says the Hammer, and I want to kill the guy.

  Sergeant Kate McGrath came on duty that Saturday morning to the news of an assault on an Ottawa police officer in Petawawa. She stared at the email bulletin in dismay. Petawawa. What were the chances that two Ottawa Police investigations were taking place in Petawawa at the same time? Nil. The killer was at it again, and this time not even the police were immune. This killer was turning more deadly and desperate with each passing day.