Vantage Point

by Scott Thornley

  McMillan erupted in a chest-rattling laugh that reflected forty years of nicotine and cynicism. “That’s rich, Mac. I’ll be there, and he’s gonna feel my breath on his neck. Keep your back to the wall on this one, bud.”

  “A moment ago I decided not to worry,” MacNeice said. “I’ve just heard from Richardson’s assistant.”

  “We got that call too. Maracle’s hopping around here, and he’s already confirmed those boys were on an Olympic Airlines flight when Kyros was trading shots with you. After that little creep Junior called, Charlie spoke to the wife. When she stopped crying, she confirmed that the other two were his cousins, both Greek nationals here on temporary visas. Mrs. Galanis didn’t trust them. Anyway, they hit Dundurn a couple of days before Palmer went missing.”

  “Thank you for offering Maracle. We can certainly use his help.”

  “It’s just a loaner, Mac. He’ll be there in a few hours. Remember, I want him back when Aziz is on her feet. Is she okay?”

  “Yes.”

  [32]

  “Tell me, MacNeice, why did you become a police officer?” Sumner crossed her hands over her notepad and smiled.

  He returned the smile. It was a question he’d been asked many times, but one he’d never fully answered. Given who she was, he decided to tell her the whole story.

  “When I was fourteen, my friend Peter invited me to his grandparents’ farm out near Dunnville. We’d feed chickens, collect eggs, clean the barn — that kind of thing. I loved it. We’d also go down the road with fishing rods and sit on the bank of a river near a bridge. We never caught anything but a sunfish or two, and we’d toss those back. We’d talk about life, about the future, about what this bird might be saying to that one, about school and sports and girls.”

  He studied her face for a moment to see if that was the level of detail she wanted from him. She smiled and nodded for him to continue.

  “Sometimes Peter’s grandmother gave us sandwiches or homemade carrot cake wrapped in tinfoil. We’d eat it as the river flowed by. One day a loud car with a tin-throat muffler stopped on the bridge above us. A door opened and there was a sudden splash off to the right. Then the door slammed shut and the car rumbled away.

  “It was a black garbage bag, and it floated for a moment before sinking. I stripped down to my shorts and dived into the water. I’m not a good swimmer, but I thrashed my way to the spot where it had disappeared.

  “When I got there, I took a deep breath and went under, digging down through twelve feet or so of dark water. I touched the bag but ran out of breath. In a panic, I came up without it. Breaking the surface, I saw Peter treading water. I was coughing and couldn’t speak, but I frantically pointed down below me. Peter took a deep breath and went down. When he came up, he was holding the bag.

  “We collapsed on the bank and opened it. Inside were four tiny, wide-eyed black kittens and a brick. We got dressed, emptied our bait bucket into the river, and put the kittens inside. With our fishing poles in hand, we ran back to the farm and told the whole story to Peter’s grandparents.”

  MacNeice remembered the sun in the kitchen, a huge pot of soup on the stove, and Peter’s grandfather nursing a mug of coffee. A metal ashtray from the local feed store held two scrunched-up cigarette butts. MacNeice knew that two butts meant it was the end of the farmer’s afternoon break.

  “‘They’ll make fine barn cats,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll take care of them and keep one, then give the rest to friends — unless you boys want them.’ Peter was happy to imagine them catching mice and voles on the farm, but I was just angry. The old man asked what was bothering me. I said whoever did it should be found and punished. His grandparents laughed — not in a mean-spirited way — but I was insistent and said they needed to know they couldn’t kill kittens.”

  MacNeice looked for Sumner’s reaction, some flicker in her face, the slightest curl of her lips, her eyebrows heading north, or a glaze of boredom that suggested he cut the story short. He was relieved to see only a listener. He felt pleased to be telling a story that even Kate knew only in part.

  “The old man wanted to be reasonable. He pointed out that we didn’t know who’d done it. Death was a fact of life for him, and while drowning kittens was unpleasant, he’d probably known worse. He may have done worse.

  “I surprised him by saying it was an orange 1972 Plymouth Barracuda. I had seen the rear end from where we were sitting. It swept up like a boat.” MacNeice drew the soft curve with his hand. “I said there probably weren’t too many orange Barracudas around Dunnville, so this one might be nearby. After all, they wouldn’t drive all the way from Dundurn just to drown kittens.”

  The memory of that statement still bothered MacNeice. He was being rude to a couple who had been generous to him, and it didn’t matter that he was passionate and wound up or even right. “It was a sarcastic comment, one that my teenage brain thought suggested the obviousness of my point.” That day remained as clear to MacNeice as if it had happened an hour before he arrived at her office. He flinched a little at the thought of his youthful petulance. She noted that discomfort with a slight sharpening of her eyes.

  “Anyway, I’d been watching Peter’s grandfather. When I mentioned the Barracuda, the old man’s eyebrows went up. Encouraged, I said that if we found the car, we’d find the mother of the kittens. But I was losing the old man. He sat back in his chair.” MacNeice recalled him shoving his hat back with a thumb, revealing the white skin high on his forehead, the only real estate on his head not weathered and browned by the sun.

  “I went too far. I said, ‘If they’re willing to do that to a bunch of kittens . . .’” MacNeice raised both hands like someone waiting for a Communion wafer. “I held up two air-pawing balls of fur and asked, ‘What else might they be willing to kill?’” It sounded worse in the telling than he hoped it had been at the time.

  “Up until that moment, Peter had been silent. He was happy just playing with the kittens. I guess he knew there was a line, a country code, that I’d crossed. For him the best strategy was to change the subject. He started talking about how we’d almost drowned diving for them. That was all it took. Suddenly the conversation was about whether we were okay. The river was deep under that bridge. His grandmother shook her head, said how awful it would be if anything happened, how would they ever tell our parents.”

  MacNeice took a deep breath and sat forward slightly. “That’s when I knew I wanted to be a cop.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  He didn’t answer at first, and not because he didn’t understand the question. “Well, there’s been a lot of water under that bridge by now.” He smiled, trying to pivot away from the embarrassment. “I realized I wanted to keep people — and kittens — safe. And yes, I still do.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ in that statement,” Sumner said.

  “Homicide’s always called in after the fact. Someone’s been murdered. Our job — my job — is to bring the person who did it to justice.”

  “Something was lost from that experience at the bridge, then?”

  “Something’s always lost. In my work the kittens are always murdered . . . a wife, a child, a husband, a cop, an addict . . . a priest.”

  “Thank you for your story, Detective. The idealism of youth is often the first casualty. While you’ve learned over time how to manage your — let’s call it ‘enthusiasm,’ I’ve been aware of your idealism since our first session. It’s a deep, calm pool that defines who you are.”

  He wasn’t sure about that. If he’d known then that there was little he could do to eliminate murder, would he still have wanted to be a cop?

  Sumner may have read his mind. “Given what you know now, if you had the opportunity to rethink the career path your young self chose, would you take it?”

  MacNeice turned away from her and looked through the opening in the sheers, hoping something would
land on the sliver of silver birch outside. “I’m good at what I do. I’ve accepted the idea that there’s a cost to every job.”

  She smiled. “When our last session was terminated by that call, I filled the hour by digging further into your record, Detective. It revealed that you are exceedingly good at what you do.”

  He was still watching the narrow gap for signs of life. He looked at her. “Is your question, Doctor, how long I can keep going?”

  “No, not at all. I can easily imagine that you’ll be in Homicide for a long time. And frankly, anyone looking at your record” — she opened her handwritten notes — “would be relieved to hear that.”

  “There’s a ‘but’?”

  “Not a ‘but.’ More of an ‘and.’ Ten years ago I did a research paper on active-duty servicemen. Each member of my study group had had at least three tours of duty in Afghanistan, and all of them were going back again. It wasn’t that they felt indispensable to the stated mission. They saw their value on a much more granular level. They were there for the local farmer and his family, there to protect the girls who wanted to go to school, the villagers who’d suffered at the hands of extremists. And of course they felt immense loyalty to their fellow soldiers. You have that same fundamental commitment to protect life while remaining loyal to your colleagues. The ‘and’ is that each of the soldiers felt certain that the moment they left the field for good, everything they had done to help would collapse. So they continued.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “We have to ask, at what cost to the individual soldier, or to you? I am part of your support system, for one hour a week and for a limited time. You have no surviving family. You use alcohol to help you sleep. You are not delusional in the slightest, yet you have conversations with your late wife.” She closed the file and put her notepad on top of it. “In short, my report to your superior will be that you are healthy, competent, and stable. Whatever methods you’ve devised to deal with your PTSD issues are yours alone. And they appear to be working.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  Sumner laughed. “MacNeice, I left the curtains behind me slightly open for your benefit. I know you’re looking and listening for birds through that narrow opening, not using it to escape from me or my questions, or my relentless gaze.”

  “You’d make a good cop, Doctor.”

  “I’m quite happy doing what I do, thank you. No, I’m not firing you. If you ever need a sounding board, call me. But we have fulfilled DC Wallace’s request.”

  * * *

  Driving away, MacNeice wondered where Sumner went to offload the horrors of her day. He made a mental note to ask the next time he visited.

  [33]

  MacNeice pushed open the door to Aziz’s room and found the head nurse changing bandages. “Sorry. I’ll wait outside.”

  “No, Mac, come in. You can be my patient advocate.”

  She was on her side, her arms above her head. The other intravenous tube was gone, and so too were the monitors. The nurse lowered Aziz’s gown for modesty but kept working. The entry wound, a dark red pucker of flesh, was surrounded by a sloppy orange stain of surgical disinfectant. MacNeice couldn’t help but notice the soft rise of Aziz’s hip above the sheet. The nurse, who may have guessed where his eyes were focused, pulled up the sheet.

  “How does it look?” Aziz asked.

  “Like it’s healing.” He smiled. “How do you feel?”

  “Much better. I walked the length of the corridor earlier, without any help.”

  “She did it with a walker, but you can tell where this is going.” The nurse finished putting on the fresh bandage. “Lean forward now and we’ll do the back.”

  MacNeice moved to the other side of the bed, and what he saw made his stomach tighten. The bandage came away with a large patch of dried blood. This was not a tight little pucker like the entry wound. Spidery lines of torn flesh surrounded a bloody crust the size of a quarter. The whole area looked angry, made more so by the black stitches criss-crossing the tears.

  “How does it look?”

  Aziz was so cheerful he wondered if it was the medication. “It looks fine, Fiza. Yes, I think it looks good. Nurse, do you agree?”

  “That was pathetic, Mac.” Aziz was straining to see the wound.

  The nurse looked back at him, unimpressed by his attempt to sugar-coat the truth. “Well, Detective, the surgeon did a very good job.” She wiped away the dried blood with disinfectant, which helped things. Turning to Aziz, she added, “Once this has healed, put vitamin E ointment on it every day and massage the scar tissue. In time it will settle down.” She applied tape to a four-inch square of gauze and pulled the gown down and the sheet up. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this could have been much worse.”

  Once the nurse had wheeled her supply trolley out of the room, Aziz rolled gingerly onto her back. “Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth? Well, you have a lovely hipbone. And you’ve got a starburst scar that will fade with vitamin E. But right now, it does look pretty nasty.” He pulled up a chair. “What did she mean by ‘You can tell where this is going’?”

  “I asked to be discharged today.” Her eyes welled up and she turned away.

  He laid a hand gently on her shoulder. “The hospital will arrange for a wound-care specialist every day, as well as someone to provide meals and bathe you. It’s only for a week or so.”

  “I’m okay, Mac. Just feeling sorry for myself. And very, very tired.” She turned and looked at him. “I do have a favour to ask, though. You can say no and I’ll understand.”

  “Anything.”

  “Well, when I was a girl, my mother would run her hand through my hair to put me to sleep. I wish she was here . . . Will you stroke my hair, Mac, just for a while?” Her eyes focused on his. “And really, it’s okay if you say no.”

  “I won’t say no.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, MacNeice noticed that her breathing had slowed and she was asleep. When he’d begun stroking her hair, he’d noticed her brow furrowing and occasional twitches at the corners of her mouth, but now all was calm. Resisting the urge to kiss her forehead, he quietly left the room.

  Walking past the lounge set aside for patients and their families, the flat-screen TV caught his eye. The sound had been muted, but looking at the press conference footage, he didn’t need to hear it. Wallace’s face gave it away. His mouth was closed and he was clenching his teeth as he fielded a question from a reporter. Judging by the flush on his neck, it wasn’t the first question about what the local news had taken to calling the “Palmer-Galanis Affair.” When Wallace spoke, his hands, holding onto the lectern, were white-knuckle tight. His eyes never wandered from his questioner. The screen was split: Wallace filled the left side and on the right were a photo of Palmer, smiling in his dress uniform, and a snapshot of Kyros Galanis in a T-shirt. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Chief’s dancing. Covering for a bad cop,” said an old man in a wheelchair, his voice barely above a raspy whisper. He was wearing a hospital gown open at the back, revealing the bony ridge of his spine.

  His wife sat beside him, nodding, tapping the purse on her lap for emphasis. She added as she nodded, “You can tell he’s lying. Look at that one next to him. They’re all in on it.”

  DS McMillan was the one next to him, and it was true. He looked more wound-up than Wallace. Stone-faced, neither man gave an outward sign that they felt any empathy or responsibility for what had happened.

  MacNeice’s cellphone buzzed in his pocket. “Vertesi, boss. We’ve got two dead in an alley out on King West. Not far from the Golden Goose. And check this — there’s a V, but this one’s turned away from the action, not into it.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  [34]

  The alley was used mostly for waste removal and deliveries to the neighbouring strip mall. Given
the strong smell of urine, it was also the preferred toilet for the beer hall down the street. There were Dumpsters behind each business, with twenty- to thirty-foot gaps between.

  As he approached from King Street, MacNeice saw Vertesi’s unmarked car parked behind three cruisers and two EMS units. No emergency this; everyone appeared to be standing near their vehicles, drinking coffee, locked in animated conversation. The entrance to the alley was taped off behind three beefy uniforms, there to discourage onlookers. It struck MacNeice that the onlookers were being attracted by the flashing lights and the cops waving at pedestrians, kids on bikes, and passing cars. It wasn’t the actual crime scene; that was hidden from the street by the Dumpsters.

  Vertesi and Williams were standing between the third and fourth Dumpster. They turned as MacNeice approached. “It’s Mister V, sir, but he’s gone off script,” Williams said, turning back to the gap.

  “Give me a minute to absorb this.” MacNeice moved past him.

  One of the victims was wearing an iridescent green suit, an orange T-shirt, and black slip-on shoes. The other wore black zip-up ankle boots, white socks, a black suit, and a T-shirt that barely covered his stomach. The slim man in the green suit looked to be five foot six or so, while the other was six foot and heavy.

  A chrome-plated pistol lay near the far bin, and a Glock a few feet from the man in black; his right knee and everything below it swung grotesquely at a right angle to his upper leg. He resembled a broken toy, if heavy boys in black were kids’ toys. As MacNeice looked more closely, he saw that the man wasn’t fat; he was what MacNeice’s mother used to call “big-boned.” His head was turned away and upward, as if he was desperate to see what was behind him without actually turning around.

  “Neither weapon has been fired, boss,” said Vertesi.

  The man in the green suit was spread-eagled on his back as if he’d just passed out. But his nostrils were near his forehead and the length of his nose had apparently disappeared into his skull. That left behind his hideously exposed gums. Between his teeth was a tongue so swollen it looked like a gum bubble about to be popped.