The case had concluded yesterday, and the jury was out for the night. Half an hour ago they’d come back with their verdict: Campbell was guilty of first-degree murder. To Kennicott it felt good. Very, very good.
Behind him, the door swung open. Albert Fernandez, the prosecutor, came in still wearing his crisply pressed court robes. Unlike some lawyers who grew progressively shabbier as a long trial dragged on, Fernandez was always well dressed. He wore a fresh white shirt every day, shined his black shoes to a high gloss, and no matter how tired he was he never let it show.
He put a bankers’ box squarely on a corner of the crowded desk. “This is the last one,” he said. “It contains all my trial notes.” Fernandez was also one of the most organized people Kennicott had ever met. The contents of this box would be labelled and in perfect order.
“I must get home; my wife and kids have hardly seen me for months,” Fernandez said. “I’ll come in Sunday morning to help you pack everything up correctly.”
“No problem,” Kennicott said. “I’ve got this.”
“Thanks. Very kind of you.”
They looked at each other. For the last ten weeks, the two men had lived in the cocoon of this case, working around the clock. There had been no media coverage of the trial, and no one in the Crown’s office had paid any attention to it. That didn’t matter to either of them. They’d worked as hard on this trial as they would have done had it made the headlines.
The only spectators regularly in the court had been Kyle Little’s bereaved mother and aunt. And now what did those two women have left? The emptiness of their lives without their son and nephew. But at least the killer had been convicted.
“You should be proud of the work you did,” Fernandez said.
“You should be too.”
They shook hands.
“Don’t stay late.”
“No worries.”
Kennicott shut the door behind Fernandez. Back at the desk, he picked up a binder and filed it in a new empty box. There would almost certainly be an appeal, and he wasn’t going to leave any stone unturned to make sure this verdict stuck.
Ari Greene, the detective who had brought Kennicott into the homicide squad and been his mentor, had taught him that it was best to pack up a file right away. You never knew what was going to happen next, and if you put the task off, you never knew when you’d get back to it.
Kennicott shook his head. Ari Greene. He kept trying to put the man out of his mind. For five years Greene had kept him under his wing, had shown him secret parts of the city, where he had contacts and hiding places. They’d often meet early in the morning at Caldense, a Portuguese bakery on Dundas Street West about a ten-minute walk from Kennicott’s flat. Greene would question him about a case they were investigating. He’d been like a law professor, prodding Kennicott to think through things from a different angle.
Almost a year and a half ago, everything changed when Jennifer Raglan, the former head Crown attorney, was found strangled to death in a room at a sleazy motel. Kennicott had been the officer in charge of the case. It came to light that Greene had been her lover. He’d found her body but had run from the scene without calling 911 and had tried to hide their affair. Kennicott had been forced to charge the man who had been his mentor, then his partner, with first-degree murder.
Thirteen weeks later the case collapsed when Greene figured out who the real killer was—Hap Charlton, the former chief of police who had just been elected mayor of Toronto. Kennicott was left feeling a crosswind of emotions. He was angry with Greene for not being honest with him and furious at himself for arresting an innocent man. Greene left the country right after his charges were thrown out. He’d disappeared without saying goodbye. Rumour was that he’d gone somewhere in Europe, but nobody knew exactly where he was or if he was ever coming back. It would probably be best for everyone, Kennicott thought, if he stayed away.
The ceiling fan in the storage room clicked on, making a pleasant white noise. He could have propped the door open to let fresh air inside, but he didn’t. He was in no hurry. He wasn’t dying to go back to his apartment alone. The weather was hot, and the city was in bloom. It would be a beautiful night outside. Wonderful for normal people who led normal lives. But it meant nothing to Kennicott. So much for the romance of being a homicide detective.
His phone rang with the hotshot ring tone indicating an urgent call. That meant there had been another murder in the city. The detectives who had families had all booked off time for their vacations, so the homicide squad was short-staffed. Now that his trial was over, Kennicott was on the bubble.
He didn’t move. Every ounce of his being wanted to ignore his phone.
He looked at the photos that he’d taken from the file. There was a picture of Kyle, a warm smile on his face, coming home from work in his Walmart uniform. Another of him playing soccer with the kids in the scrubby courtyard of the housing complex where he’d lived with his mother and aunt. And one of him with his family and friends, blowing out candles on his birthday cake last spring when he turned twenty-five.
The phone hit its third ring. Two more and it would go to voice mail.
Kennicott had learned that to be a great homicide detective you had to do more than just walk in the victim’s shoes. You had to care for the victim with every ounce of your being. It was as if you were falling in love with someone you would never get to meet.
The phone rang for the fifth and final time.
He stabbed the answer button.
“Kennicott,” he said, making sure he hid the fatigue in his voice. “What have we got?”
3
Greene stood and stared at Fox’s body. Tongue hanging out. Eyes glazed. Limbs slack. The rebar sticking out of his chest and the heavy cement blocks pinning him to the floor like a dead butterfly on a scientist’s presentation board. A thin rivulet of blood had slithered down his body and pooled on the floor beside him.
Greene didn’t move. This was a crime scene. But even from this distance, he could see the blood had not yet congealed. In the oven-like heat of the room, blood would dry fast. This murder had happened a very short time ago.
He felt sick. He was sweating, and his mind was whirling back to that horrible morning when he’d found Jennifer strangled to death in a motel room. It had been the worst moment of his life. He’d been so excited that day, rushing to meet her for what was going to be their final covert rendezvous. Final because, at last, Jennifer had decided to leave her husband. There would be no more secrets. No more hiding. Finally, they could be together.
But Jennifer was gone. Gone. Sure, he had been arrested, put on trial, the case thrown out. But what did it really matter? Without Jennifer, did anything really matter?
Thank goodness he’d found his daughter, Alison. She and his dad were the only people he cared about now. He wanted to make a new life with her. What he didn’t want was to be a cop anymore. To have to stare at dead bodies. And yet, here he was, his eyes fixed on Livingston Fox. Dead. Horribly murdered.
He knew he should run. Move. But his feet wouldn’t budge.
He lifted his eyes from the body and scanned the room. The shed was small. There was no other door. The afternoon sunlight streamed in through the large, south-facing window. Two bare bulbs shone overhead. Neatly stacked papers on a makeshift desk were surrounded by a white jar filled with pens; a black jar filled with pencils; a stapler; a three-hole punch; two empty water bottles, one blue and one orange; and a pair of empty drinking glasses. Everything was perfectly in place. Greene looked at the walls and the plywood floor. There were no obvious signs of blood splatter anywhere. A stray pencil lay under the desk. He took in every detail. Memorized it.
He turned away and dug into his pocket for his phone. The biggest blunder he’d made when he found Jennifer’s body in that horrid motel room had been not calling 911 right away. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He tapped in the number.
“What is your emergency?” a calm female voic
e asked.
“A man has been murdered. I just came upon his body.” He knew the operator had a standard set of questions, and he wanted to cut through them quickly. “The address is Kensington Gate Condominium on College Street west of Spadina, the south side. The place is under construction. I’m in the shed at the back.”
“I’ve dispatched police and an ambulance,” the operator said after a moment’s silence. “I need a few more details. Who are you, sir?”
Greene paused. Who was he? Homicide Detective Ari Greene? Former Homicide Detective Ari Greene? Construction worker Ari Greene? Alison’s father, Ari Greene?
“I work here. Construction,” he said.
“Do you know the victim?”
Greene hesitated again. If he said Fox’s name, there was a chance a media scanner would pick it up. If he said he didn’t know, that would be a lie.
“Sir? You still there?”
“The dead man is Livingston Fox,” he said. “The owner of the property.” He hung up before she could ask more questions. He opened the shed door with his elbow and let it close on its own. He should tell Claudio right away what was going on, before the cops arrived.
Instead, he stopped. The blood beside the body was fresh. The shed had one door. Where had the killer gone?
Greene checked the ground outside the shed. No blood. How had the killer got onto the site? The only entrance, other than the main gate on College Street, was the gate in the chain link fence behind the shed, leading to the alleyway. It was a few steps away.
He shouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t. This was the worst time in his life to get involved in a murder investigation. He was determined to keep out of the limelight, and Livingston Fox’s murder would be headline news. He had to focus on his daughter. After six tough months, Alison seemed to be settling into life in Toronto.
But the killer might be close. Every second counted.
The chanting and drumming of the protesters on Augusta Avenue was growing louder. It would be easy for the killer to disappear into the crowd. The cops wouldn’t arrive for a few more minutes, and by then it could be too late.
He walked quickly around the shed. Homicide detectives never run. He could trip and that would be a disaster. He had to stay calm, focused. The back gate was ajar. The combination lock was open, hanging from the handle. Whoever had entered either knew the combination or Fox had opened the gate for them.
Greene stopped to listen. No sirens yet. He had thirty seconds, maybe fewer.
The gate was open wide enough for him to slip through without touching it. He half-tiptoed through in his construction boots, searching the ground at his feet. Dry concrete. No footprints. Not a sign of blood anywhere. One step outside he stopped and looked around. Across from him was the old two-storey house at Augusta Avenue, and he could see the protesters and the TV trucks out on the street at the western end of the alley. Just outside the gate there was a puddle in the shade against the fence where one of the protesters’ big dogs must have peed.
He wanted to walk over to where the alley turned south. Did he have time? He stopped to listen and couldn’t hear a police siren yet. He moved fast and peered around the corner.
The back alley was similar to hundreds he’d seen in downtown Toronto. On the east side there were the back of the stores and restaurants that faced out onto Spadina. The west side was lined with wooden garages belonging to the houses on Augusta, their metal doors slathered with colourful graffiti. A rusted ball hockey net and a clutch of hockey sticks were propped against one door, and two bikes were locked to a wooden fence by a heavy chain. In back of one of the restaurants, cigarette butts were piled on the pavement beside a pair of overturned red milk crates.
He returned to the open gate for one last look. Turned to the two-storey house across the alley.
There had to be a clue.
Something.
Nothing.
4
Alison Gilroy had lost track. How many little cups of green tea had she drunk in the last half hour? Eight, maybe ten? She was sitting alone in the backroom of Huibing Gardens, a steamy Chinese restaurant on Spadina Avenue, staring at her empty notebook, thinking it made no sense.
Livingston Fox, the so-called King of Condos, was supposed to have met her here at three. She checked her phone for the time. It was three-fifteen and Fox still hadn’t shown up. This was not like him. His life was scheduled into exact time slots. For the last month, she’d met him here at the same time every Friday afternoon for half an hour, and he’d always been on time.
Fox had been a terrific source of stories for Kensington Confidential, the blog she’d started two months earlier. Two weeks ago he’d given her a scoop: he was getting engaged. It had given her blog a huge boost. Last week he’d told her he had an even better story for her. He said it was going to make major headlines and send her numbers through the roof.
The man was obsessed with secrecy. Before their first meeting at the restaurant, he’d given her precise directions about how to get here, which she’d followed to a T. She walked along Oxford, one block south of College, then up a path to the alleyway at the back of the restaurant, where a red milk crate held the rear door open. Inside, behind a beaded curtain, was a room with two chairs and a table always already set with a pot of tea and a pair of little white porcelain cups.
Fox had insisted that she never go into the main restaurant and had told her that none of the staff would ever come into the room. She was to wait alone until he showed up.
So, where was he? Why hadn’t he come?
This morning she’d awoken to her first taste of Canadian-style summer heat and humidity. Back home in England they didn’t have anything like this. And to make matters worse, this room had no windows and no air conditioning. She had never been so hot.
It all felt like more bad luck in the worst year of her life. One night last August, two weeks before she was set to start her second year at university, her mother collapsed while cooking dinner. Alison had called emergency right away but it hadn’t made any difference. Her mother had died before she hit the ground. A brain aneurism, the doctor said. Could happen to anyone at any time.
Alison was an only child, and her mother was the only family she had. She’d never met her father. Her mother had told her he’d left when she was a baby and was living somewhere in New Zealand with a new wife and kids. That’s what Alison believed until a week after her mother died when David Joyce, the family solicitor, invited her to his office to discuss her mum’s will.
“Alison, I have a rather large surprise for you,” Joyce said when she walked in. A man she had never seen before was sitting in a chair across from the lawyer’s desk. “This is Detective Ari Greene. He’s Canadian.”
Greene stood. He was tall and had a nice smile. Alison had no idea what he was doing there.
“Detective?” she said with a nervous laugh. “Is there something wrong?”
“No, not all,” Greene said.
He had a quiet warmth, and there was something vaguely familiar about him. What was it?
“I’m from Toronto. I knew your mother years ago when she lived in Canada.”
“I remember. Mum told me she liked the snow, and she said that the summers were beautiful but terribly humid.”
She looked at Joyce. “I don’t understand.”
Joyce glanced down at some papers on his desk. “Your mother had planned to tell you about Mr. Greene next year, when you turned twenty-one. She left me specific instructions that if, in the unfortunate event that something happened to her before that time, I should contact both you and Mr. Greene.”
“Contact us about what?”
She looked back at the stranger. “Sir. Can you explain this?”
“After your mother returned to England, she sent me a Christmas card every year with a picture of the two of you,” Greene said.
“Those photos were so embarrassing. I hope you threw them out.”
“No. I kept them all.”
&n
bsp; “Why would you do that?”
He gave her a blank look.
“Wait. What year did Mum leave Canada?”
“Nineteen ninety-five.”
Her birthday was February 1, 1996. “When? What month?”
“April.”
It wasn’t hard to do the math. But it didn’t make any sense. She turned to Joyce. “But Mum told me my father lives in New Zealand and . . .”
The lawyer shook his head. “I’m afraid she made that up.”
Alison nodded. She started to rock from side to side. This was unbelievable.
She looked at Greene. Stared. It took a few seconds until he returned her gaze.
Yes, something about him was familiar. It was his eyes. He had the same grey-green eyes with flecks of yellow as she had.
“Did you know?” she demanded.
“I didn’t. I had no idea.”
“But you kept our Christmas cards?”
“I don’t know why. I just did.”
How could this be? In the last week she’d lost her mother and found a father.
“Do you . . . have a family or something?” she asked him.
“No. I’ve never been married. Never had children. Well, never thought I did until . . .” His voice drifted off.
“Your mother thought it was easier this way,” Joyce said. “Like you, Detective Greene was gobsmacked when I informed him. I assure you she was going to tell both of you—”
“Toronto?” Now Alison was shaking her head.
“Yes, Toronto.”
“You mean I’m half Canadian?”
“I guess you are.” He laughed for the first time.
So did she.
Heart of the City Page 2
