Vantage Point

by Scott Thornley

  “Anything else?”

  “Not much on Father Terry,” Vertesi said. “He closed his church years ago and gave up the religious habit.” He paused for the groans and a withering glance from MacNeice. “Sorry, boss. He retired from the Church and moved in with Matthew after his wife died. I also checked with the cable companies, Dundurn Hydro, water, and gas. None of them were called or sent to the Terry residence.”

  MacNeice was about to call it a day when the phone rang. Ryan called out, “Detective Aziz, it’s for you. Someone from the gallery.”

  She looked MacNeice’s way. “I sent the Punchbowl photo to Ridout, the curator Nicole recommended.”

  They all turned in her direction. She was listening, writing furiously on her notepad. After a moment she threw a thumbs-up into the air. It was a gesture so culturally out of character for Aziz that MacNeice smiled.

  “Yes . . . You’ve been very helpful. Goodbye.” She was still transcribing the conversation. “That was Jeffery Ridout, the DAG’s contemporary curator. He recognized the image straightaway.”

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Swetsky barked.

  “Quite.” She looked in the direction of the whiteboard photo. “It’s by two brothers named Chapman — they’re alive, working in the U.K. But it’s really about their defacing of a work by Goya.”

  “Goya?” Swetsky asked. “Is he a local guy?”

  “Spanish. Not local.” Aziz smiled and turned to Ryan. “Ry, search for ‘Goya’s Disasters of War — victims wearing animal heads.’”

  In less than a minute Ryan swung around on his stool and clapped his hands on his knees. “I’m printing out some images.” Turning back to the “Millennium Falcon,” his homemade supercomputer, he read, “‘Francisco de Goya completed Disasters of War in 1820.’ It’s gruesome, but he wasn’t into animal heads.” Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled. “But Dinos and Jake Chapman are.”

  The printer slowly began spitting out images. MacNeice, functionally illiterate with any technology beyond a CD player, occasionally worried that Ryan’s customization and recycling of parts from the division’s obsolete-computer trash heap might one day set Division ablaze.

  Ryan continued. “Two brothers, born in the U.K. in the 1960s. They painted over a rare set of Goya’s original etchings with” — Ryan lifted the prints from the machine — “clown faces, dog and rodent heads, and a horse’s head.” Ryan handed the images to MacNeice, and the printer shut down with a descending mechanical whine.

  MacNeice began taping the printouts to the whiteboard but said nothing.

  “So what’ve we got here, boss?” Vertesi asked as they gathered around him. “The Chapmans, as Fiza would say, are taking the piss out of Goya, and our guy’s taking the piss out of the Chapman brothers?”

  “Accurate,” MacNeice said, standing back to study the board.

  “It’s pretty esoteric,” said Fiza.

  “Meaning?” Swetsky asked.

  “Obscure.” Fiza felt embarrassed for sounding too posh.

  “Well, esoteric or obscure, it’s seriously sick shit.” Swetsky had seen enough. He turned away, shaking his head.

  “The eye of the beholder, I guess.” Williams shrugged.

  “What’s V’s point, though? And what did that guy in the Punchbowl do to deserve this?” Vertesi was examining the clown face pasted over Goya’s etching of a naked man jammed onto the trunk of a tree.

  “A coincidence of circumstances, perhaps?” MacNeice said as he compared the images. “Wrong place and worse timing — he and the Terrys somehow fitted a profile?” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It appears to confirm that our man is an artist and that his subjects are chosen to play dead stand-ins.”

  Aziz offered, “I think he’s walking a fine line between fiction and reality.” When Swetsky swung around with his eyebrows close to his hairline, she qualified her comment. “In these photographs,” she said, pointing to the Amelia Street and Punchbowl bodies, “the viewer naturally assumes that it’s beet juice or ketchup and not blood. Most people would think they’re just models posing as corpses —”

  “Meaning no gallery knowingly exhibits snuff art,” Williams said.

  “Exactly. And because we think it’s theatre, the artist will have the satisfaction of duping us, or at the very least leading us to the critical point of his work.” She shrugged her shoulders before adding, “I’m making huge leaps here.”

  The telephone rang. Ryan picked it up, listened for a moment, and put the receiver down. He turned to MacNeice. “Sir, that was Dr. Richardson calling. She would” — he closed his eyes to recall her exact words — “enjoy the pleasure of your company. Now, please. Then she hung up.”

  Aziz was looking at her cellphone. “Mac, Ridout’s emailing me. ‘Anything I can do to help, just let me know.’ Now that he’s found the Chapmans, do you want me to keep him available?”

  “Yes.” MacNeice turned away from the board. “He might know some of the artists working in Dundurn. It’s a long shot, but one of them may be our man, or someone that might know him or his work.”

  Looking at the snapshot of the brass V, MacNeice glanced at Williams. “First thing tomorrow, get on to signage companies in the area. See if you can identify where the V’s are coming from.” Williams nodded. “And anyone who’s come in lately to buy two V’s . . . or maybe a dozen.”

  The room fell silent. Once again it was clear that everyone thought this was just the beginning. MacNeice felt that if the perpetrator was going to exhibit the images somewhere in some form, two were probably not enough.

  As if she were reading his mind, Aziz asked, “Is it too soon to consider where these images could be exhibited?”

  “No, it isn’t. I would think not in Canada or the States.”

  “Maybe,” Williams said. “But if they’re redone as paintings, like Fiza said, no one will think they’re really dead. What kind of market is there for that stuff?”

  “Collectors of social commentary. European and Asian tastes tend to be edgier than those in North America,” Aziz suggested.

  “Let’s find out about newly arrived artists from Toronto and elsewhere.” MacNeice picked up a notebook and pen. “I’m off to Barton Street.”

  [23]

  A corpse on a table under painfully bright lights is a ­forlorn sight. But three bodies lined up side by side took MacNeice’s breath away. As he struggled to gain his composure, he searched for a neutral site to park his attention.

  “MacNeice, you are prompt. Thank you.” From her office, Richardson’s crisp and cheerful voice was exactly what he needed.

  He turned away from the tables and stepped out of the punishingly lit room and into the soft incandescent lighting of her office, though not before catching a sly smile from Richardson’s assistant. In MacNeice’s opinion, Junior found too much pleasure in the discomfort of others.

  “Do take a seat, Mac. We can do what I’ve called you here for in the relative comfort of my office. Tea or Tio Pepe?”

  “If I’d stayed out there much longer, sherry would have been as essential as oxygen.” He sat down, trying to hide the first deep breath he’d taken since leaving the Chevy. “But no thank you, Mary.”

  “To the Terrys, then.” She opened her file folder, the corners and the fold still crisp, though he’d seen enough of her bloated and dog-eared case files to know that wouldn’t last. “Matthew, the son — nothing unusual. He had spaghetti carbonara, several glasses of red wine, bread, and what looks like vanilla gelato earlier in the evening. The father had eaten very little: toast and marmalade, tea — several cups.” She eased the turquoise glasses down her nose and peered over them at MacNeice. “Both men died at roughly the same time, two nights before they were discovered, Matthew between nine and ten and his father between ten and eleven.

  “The weapon was a nine-millimetre pistol, judgi
ng by the entry and exit wounds. No doubt that will be confirmed by the slugs that Forensics retrieved from the wall. But here’s what I find particularly interesting.” She arranged four slides on the illuminated X-ray screen. “They’re cross-sections of the blood vessels in the upper-left heart muscle. These two” — she pointed to the images on the left — “are from Matthew. The others are from Howard Terry.” MacNeice rose from his chair. “Notice any distinctions between them?” She stood back so he could get a closer look.

  He looked from one set to the other several times. Moving a large circular magnifying glass along the shelf, MacNeice stopped where he could frame Matthew’s and his father’s slides at the same time. After studying them, he turned to Richardson. She stood with her arms crossed, smiling with anticipation.

  “I don’t know how to describe it beyond this: the son’s slide looks dense and Father Terry’s looks open — the difference between salami and capicolla. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense. Yes, splendid. I won’t bore you with the medical terminology; I’ll just speculate about why they’re different.” She moved the magnifying glass out of the way. “Discounting the ravages of time, diet, lifestyle, and so on, I think you’re seeing two responses to the situation they found themselves in.” She paused. “Do you have any idea why Matthew was in the basement?”

  “None. He was shot near the electrical panel, but why he was there isn’t clear. We checked with Dundurn Hydro and they hadn’t dispatched anyone, because there wasn’t a problem.”

  Richardson nodded, then began a lucid and, happily for MacNeice, understandable analysis of the slides. Matthew Terry, she said, may have been under extreme stress. “Possibly just being down there with a stranger was enough, but certainly once the weapon was revealed, that would have instilled immediate terror. I believe the constricted blood vessels are his response to terror, as occurs when livestock enter an abattoir.” She glanced at MacNeice. “A reaction, it’s speculated, that can explain tough meat.”

  “And you think his father wasn’t under the same stress?”

  “We’ll likely never know what transpired in that house, but it’s clear from this image” — she tapped the slide with her pencil — “that he didn’t react to the situation the way his son did.” Richardson then talked about Jesuit monks who had been burned at the stake or stripped of their flesh on their way to sainthood. “First-hand accounts of their torture consistently report a calm, almost serene, beatific demeanour. In other words,” Richardson said, “a priest, even one who’s renounced his faith, might find the deity within and be able to accept and possibly even embrace his own death.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Of course not — it’s rubbish. Though it’s conceivable that Father Terry did. And there’s more.” She opened the folder again and flipped through two pages of commentary digitally transferred from the autopsy voice recording. “Howard Terry had a Stage Four brain tumour and a cancerous mass in his lung. You already know about those. We also found a cancerous lymph node in his neck and another in his left armpit.” She pointed to the right side of her own neck and more generally to her upper left arm. “I suspect the brain is the source, but without dissecting all his organs, we’re not ready to declare that the primary site — what Junior refers to as ‘the mothership.’ It’s likely that his health records would tell us, though for our purposes it’s not important, because he didn’t die of cancer. He died — again as Junior puts it — from ‘lead poisoning.’” She shook her head. “He’s very good, Mac, but he can be such a tiresome boy.”

  “He’s not a boy.”

  “Touché.” Turning back to the slides, she concluded. “I think this man knew his time on earth was limited — very limited.”

  “And so his killer just talked him out of life?”

  She shrugged, nodded slowly, and closed the file. “Going strictly by his blood vessels, I’m confident enough in my theory to suggest that he wasn’t terrified at the time of death.”

  “I’ll take that sherry now, if you don’t mind.”

  Richardson took two small, delicately engraved glasses from a silver tray and poured two measures from a heavy crystal decanter. “My grandfather gave me this set. It was something he acquired in India before the war.” She handed MacNeice a glass and lifted hers. “Chin-chin, Detective.”

  While he was tempted to throw it back in one go, MacNeice sipped the sherry as he imagined a gentleman would. It warmed his throat, not with the spirited heat of grappa but with a dry/sweet overtone that made him reach for a chair. “Can we do the next one sitting down?”

  “Of course. I won’t be needing the screen.” She turned off the viewing light and sat across from him at her desk. “I apologize, Mac, for not inquiring as to your health. Can I assume that you’re fully recovered from the last case?”

  “I am, more or less. A bit fatigued at times, but that’s all.” He was now regretting his earlier run.

  “This next one won’t take long. It’s pretty much as I said earlier.” She opened another virgin file. “A user, twenty-five or so. I’ll spare you the details of his stomach contents, other than to say there were traces of a variety of pharmacological substances, from codeine to cough syrup. They didn’t kill him, nor did the chest wounds. This fellow died from a dose of fentanyl and heroin, a lethal mixture that would have killed an Olympic shot putter within a half-hour of ingestion. There are two things I can say now that I couldn’t earlier. One is speculative and the other concerns timing, and is factual.”

  “How long after he died was he shot?”

  “Five or six hours.” Her certainty was delivered quickly. She turned a page in her file. “As to the other, given what we found in his system — and this is a leap, Mac — his addiction had progressed to the point where all but a few of his injection sites were months old. However, the cough syrup and codeine were fresh, within several hours of the overdose.” Richardson could see that MacNeice was waiting for more. “I’m in your territory suggesting this, but given the street value and purity of the drugs that killed him, I find it hard to believe that he came into a windfall to obtain them.”

  “His killer murders him with the drugs and then, five or six hours later, fires two rounds into his chest?” MacNeice wanted Richardson to confirm what he and his team already suspected.

  “I know it beggars belief, but yes.”

  “Good. Then we’re on the same page.” He drank the last of the sherry and smiled. “I’d better get back to it, then.”

  Leaving Richardson’s lab in the bowels of DGH, MacNeice gazed up at a fundraising poster for the hospital’s cancer wing. He was struck by the language and reminded how it hadn’t changed. It was, and seemed always to have been, the language of conflict and war: fighting, defeating, winning or losing battles against cancer. His heart sank as he remembered how brutally Kate had lost, even with his help. He turned and walked slowly towards the Chevy.

  Do you recall that first examination room? How it was caught somewhere between clinical cold and warm domesticity?

  “It’s etched in my mind, Kate.”

  The sink, the cleansing solutions, the paper-towel dispenser, and that odd kitchen cabinet that didn’t appear to serve a purpose.

  “I remember the stillness as we waited. Even together, our shallow breathing wouldn’t have fogged a window.”

  If there’d been a window.

  “The fear of what we might hear.”

  I was already becoming more of a condition than a person. What was that awful yellow plastic box on the wall for?

  “Used syringes and soiled bandages, darling. Not for you.”

  Small mercy.

  [24]

  MacNeice’s desk telephone rang at 8:35 p.m., startling both him and Aziz. They were the only ones still on the floor. The phone’s ringing echoed insistently through the empty office.

  “It
’s DI Maracle, sir.”

  “What have you got, Charlie?”

  Maracle had knocked on the door of Palmer’s neighbour. During the interview he was told that the missing detective was building a motorcycle in a rental unit nearby, to replace the one that had burned up years before. Maracle went back through the house and, after an hour or so, found a garage-door opener. “Palmer’s garage doesn’t have an automatic door. Stamped into the back of the fob is ‘USI’ and a seven-digit number.”

  “USI?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t know either. Turns out it’s a new chain of storage units called U-Stor-It. The closest one is a half-mile south of Palmer’s house. Usi gives out two fobs per customer, so it’s possible he’s got the other one on him.” Maracle had gone back to Division to write it up, and then, pursuing a hunch, he’d called one of the fleet mechanics responsible for maintaining the force’s motorcycles. Palmer was a regular visitor, asking all kinds of questions about parts and performance. “Apparently he’s been building that bike for at least six years.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “Agreed. Sir, I know we want this on low heat, so I was thinking I’d drive up to Usi now, just to rule it out.” Maracle added, “Couldn’t hurt, right?”

  “Aziz and I will meet you at Palmer’s house. We’ll go on from there in my car. Be there in thirty minutes.”

  Aziz looked up from her desk. “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way. Do you have your weapon?”

  “Yes.”