“Well,” she said, taking a few steps toward him, “I suppose we should shake hands or something.”
It felt strange, but at the same time comforting, to touch him. He told her he was staying in a hotel near Russell Square and that he was in no hurry to leave. He wanted time to get to know her. She liked the idea.
She googled his name right after that first meeting. He was a top homicide detective and the only child of Holocaust survivors. The weird thing was, she loved P. D. James’s mysteries, which featured an older detective who was single with no kids. Google turned up tons of articles about Jennifer Raglan, a Crown prosecutor who’d been murdered. Raglan, a married woman, had been Greene’s lover. He’d been charged with murdering her, and while he was out on bail, he’d found the real killer.
Amazing.
At first their relationship was strained. She was a journalism student, and a few times a week he’d take her out to dinner after school. He was shy and awkward around her. She didn’t know him well enough to hug or kiss him, but she liked his sly sense of humour and she’d give him a playful punch on his arm whenever she cracked a joke or he said something funny.
He rented a flat near her home and, bit by bit, he became the one steady person in her life while everything else was falling apart. Every place she went in London reminded her of her mother. She hated sitting in class and her mind kept wandering. Her friends’ crises and concerns seemed trivial: you broke up with your boyfriend, well guess what? My mother just fell down dead, and this stranger from Canada showed up and he’s my father. She called him Ari. There was no way she was going to call him Dad, and she wasn’t going to call him Mr. Greene, so she’d settled on his first name.
After he’d been in England for about three months, she announced over dessert in a vegetarian restaurant in Soho, “I’m going to quit school.”
She thought he wouldn’t approve and he’d tell her that she should try to stick it out. But he understood right away.
“You can’t concentrate, can you?” he said.
“How’d you guess?”
“Remember, I was a homicide detective for a long time. I’ve seen how hard it is for people to recover from the death of a loved one, especially a parent.”
“I think I need to get out of London.”
“Makes sense. Where do you want to go?”
“Well,” she said, nervous around him for the first time and unsure how he would react to her idea. “How about I move to Canada with you?”
He almost choked on the rhubarb pie he was eating, before he broke out in a gigantic grin. A month later they were on a plane.
In Toronto she met his father, her grandfather Yitzhak, who was the opposite of Ari. Outgoing and fun, he hugged and kissed her all the time. Within days she was calling him Grandpa Y, and soon he started fixing up a room for her in the basement of Ari’s house to give her some privacy. He took her to Kensington Market, where he’d lived when he first came to Canada. Kensington wasn’t exactly Portobello, but it wasn’t all modern and ordered like most parts of Toronto. It was the first place in the city where she felt at home.
Because Ari was Canadian, she had the automatic right to citizenship, but since he wasn’t listed on her birth certificate, she was required to get a private DNA test for proof. Ari, being a homicide detective, had already had one done.
“It turns out I’m three-quarters Jewish,” she told him and Grandpa Y when the results arrived. “There was always a bit of mystery about where Grammy, my mum’s mum, came from.”
“Do you think your mother knew?” Ari asked.
“I’ll never know,” she said.
“But now we know,” Grandpa Y said, “where you got your sense of humour.”
They all laughed. It was a warm moment.
She checked the time again on her phone. It was three forty-five. She’d been waiting for Fox for three-quarters of an hour and now the big story, the protest march, was about to start one block away. She was tempted to call Fox’s assistant, Maxine. But he’d made her promise that, no matter what, even if he were late, she wouldn’t ask anyone where he was. He wasn’t late. He wasn’t coming. She had to leave. But it was complicated.
In January, at Ari’s suggestion—so she could meet people her age, get to know the city and further her career—Alison had enrolled in journalism school downtown. But it was the same as when she’d gone back to school in London after her mother died. She couldn’t focus. She started skipping classes and hanging out in Kensington Market. She launched Kensington Confidential as an anonymous blog and wrote about the community and its growing conflicts with developers. People began to send her stories, and within weeks she had more than two thousand followers. Now thirty other bloggers wrote alongside her, including the organizer of today’s protest march, Cassandra Amberlight, who posted five or six times a day. Managing the blog was taking up all her time, and two months ago she’d dropped out of school.
The problem was that she didn’t have the heart to tell Ari what she was doing. He’d been supportive of her going back to school. Recently she’d been getting inquiries about buying ad space on her blog, and she wanted to wait until it was bringing in good money to break the news to him. In the meantime, she pretended she was still a student, and they’d text each other at four every afternoon when she’d supposedly finished her classes.
But then, last week, Ari got a job at the Kensington Gate construction site. Talk about bad timing. She had to cover the demonstration, but she couldn’t risk his seeing her on the street or on TV. Before coming to the restaurant she’d gone to one of the second-hand shops in the market and bought a plain black T-shirt, a pair of white shorts, cheap sunglasses, a Toronto Blue Jays cap, and a small yellow backpack, and had changed into the new clothes. As long as she wore the baseball cap, Ari wouldn’t be able to spot her in the crowd.
Ten to four. And she was so hot. That was it. She threw back the last of the tea and smacked the cup down on the Formica table. She put on the sunglasses and the baseball cap, slipped on the backpack, and headed out the back door.
Where the hell, she wondered, was Livingston Fox?
5
Kennicott ducked out of the Crown attorney storage room, sprinted down the criss-crossing courthouse escalators and ran out onto the street. After being indoors all day, he felt the heat and humidity hit him and immediately began to sweat. He jumped into a squad car that pulled up for him. A young female officer was at the wheel.
“Detective Kennicott,” he said.
“PC Sheppard, 93615,” she said, a big grin on her face. “You might want to do up your seat belt.” She blasted her high-volume siren and gunned the engine.
“Good idea,” he said, buckling up as the car lurched forward and threw him back against the seat. He grabbed the door handle to steady himself while she swerved through traffic.
With his free hand he pulled out his phone. Detective Kamil Darvesh, his newly assigned partner, had recently been promoted to Homicide and this would be his first major case. He would have gotten news of the murder and was probably waiting for Kennicott’s call.
“It’s Kennicott. You heard?”
“I did.”
“Who found the body?”
“A worker at the site.”
“Hit the computer right away. There will be a ton of press coverage on file about the victim. I want you to download everything you can find. And contacts. Family, co-workers, friends, girlfriends. We need to get ahead of this before it breaks.”
“Already on it.”
Darvesh’s can-do attitude reminded Kennicott of how he used to work with Greene. He’d loved it when Ari would shoot him a list of things to do and he could say he’d already done them.
“Good. I’ll call you from the scene.” He hung up. Even though their line was almost certainly secure, they’d both made a point of not mentioning Fox by name, just in case.
Rush-hour traffic was building, but PC Sheppard bulldozed her way through the cars in fro
nt of her, zipped up to College Street, pulled a hard left at the lights, then executed a perfect U turn and screeched the cruiser to a halt parallel to the curb right in front of the main entrance to Kensington Gate. It was rare for a new recruit to be involved in a murder case, and she was doing all she could to make a good impression.
It had been less than ten minutes since he’d received the hotshot call. Pretty darn good.
“Nice work, Officer Sheppard,” he said.
She was still grinning from ear to ear. “I love driving.”
“Badge 93615,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“I’ll keep you in mind.”
He jumped out of the car. An ambulance was already parked in front of the condo construction site. Traffic was backed up, stalling streetcars. Overheated drivers were leaning on their horns.
A few steps over, Augusta Avenue was clogged with protesters carrying signs and shouting “Stop the Fox. Save the market.” A drummer was banging away, piling sound on sound. TV trucks, their satellite dishes aimed at the sky, lined the sidewalks while police cars were lined up on the near one, blocking the protesters from the construction site, which was now a crime scene in need of protection.
Kennicott watched several cameramen rush about. He knew the news that Fox had been murdered was bound to leak out soon and heighten tension on the street. An overweight cop was directing officers to string up police tape and keep the crowd back. Kennicott strode up to him. Greene had taught him how to do the homicide-detective walk: nice and slow. Make eye contact with the officer in charge. Be calm. Assert your authority at the start of a murder investigation but never overdo it.
As Kennicott approached, he realized he knew the cop. PC Lindsmore was an out-of-shape, never-promoted but street-smart constable and an old colleague of Greene’s.
“We need back up,” Lindsmore was saying into his radio. “Right now. I don’t care about Friday-afternoon traffic. TV crews are all over this thing. We need to shut everything down.”
Lindsmore nodded at Kennicott. “Detective, good to see you.” He offered a firm handshake.
“You too, Officer Lindsmore. What have we got?”
“You heard it was Fox, the rich-kid developer?”
“That’s all I know.”
“So, you don’t know who found him and called 911?”
“My partner told me it was one of the workers here.”
“Hmm.” Lindsmore pointed to a tall man wearing a hard hat, standing with his back to them. “There he is.”
Kennicott walked up behind the worker. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Toronto Police. My name is Detective Kennicott.”
The man turned around. “Hello, Daniel,” he said.
How did this guy know his name?
The worker extended his arm for a handshake and, with his other hand, peeled off his hard hat. It took a few seconds for Kennicott to process what was happening. He was shaking hands with Ari Greene.
6
The protest on Augusta Avenue was larger and more chaotic than Alison had expected. What was going on? Where was Cassandra Amberlight? The woman should be easy to spot as she was at least six feet tall. At most protests, she could be found shouting through an old leather megaphone.
Alison elbowed her way to the front of the line. There was no sign of her anywhere. That was strange.
Amberlight, a lawyer and activist in her late sixties whom the press had dubbed the Queen of Protests, had spent decades fighting for one cause or another: stopping the Spadina expressway from being built right through the middle of the city; protesting the city’s amalgamation with its suburbs; stopping jets from using the airport on the Toronto Islands; stopping the city’s garbage from being shipped to a native reserve. Name the protest, Amberlight would be there at the barricades, megaphone at the ready. Journalists liked to quip that she had never seen a TV camera or radio microphone she didn’t love.
The Save Kensington Coalition was her latest cause. A year earlier she’d got press coverage when she moved into an apartment above a cheese shop in the middle of the market so she could be, in her words, “front and centre in the struggle for the heart of the city.”
Alison had investigated Amberlight’s history and found that not all was rosy. She’d blown through two marriages—with a man and a woman—had seven children she rarely saw, and owed thousands of dollars in support payments. Her law office had closed after two lawyers who worked for her had filed complaints with the Law Society about her “bullying and abusive behaviour,” and in January she’d been suspended from practice for twelve months.
Alison saw a TV news reporter with a headset on standing near the police barrier. She shimmied over.
“I’m a freelance reporter,” she said. “You might have seen some articles about this protest on my blog, Kensington Confidential.” She touched the blog icon on her phone and showed it to the woman.
The reporter stared at the phone. “We’ve been trying to find you, but there’s no contact information on your site.”
“That’s intentional.”
The reporter put a finger in the air, cupped a hand over her headset, and bent forward to listen.
“Jesus,” she said into the mic. “But you can’t confirm that yet? Okay, okay, we’re on standby.”
She turned her attention back to Alison. “You’re young. You a student?”
“No.”
“What’s your accent, English?”
“Afraid so.”
“How long have you been in Canada?”
“Long enough to fall in love with the market.”
“I’ve read some of your articles on your blog. They’re good.”
“Thanks.”
“You sign them the Kensington Blogger. What’s your real name?”
Alison shook her head. “Sorry. I have to be anonymous.”
The reporter pulled out a business card and wrote some numbers on the back. She passed it over. Her name was Sheena Persad. “If you change your mind, text or email me any time. On the weekends try online first, but I might be tied up with my daughter. I’ve given you my home number. Don’t share it with anyone else.”
“Thanks. Have you seen Cassandra Amberlight?”
“The Queen of Protests? Everyone’s looking for her. At first we thought she was the murder victim.”
“Murder victim?”
“Didn’t you see the ambulance up front?”
“No, I came from the back. Where was the murder?”
Persad pointed in the direction of the condo construction site. “At Kensington Gate.”
“What?” Alison’s first thought was of her father.
“The cops sealed off the top of Augusta. These protesters are getting squeezed.”
Alison’s mouth was so dry she could hardly talk. “Any ID?”
“Nothing official.”
Persad glanced from side to side before she spoke. “It’s unconfirmed. You can’t publish a word on your blog until it is.”
“Of course.”
“Sounds like it was”—Persad flipped the microphone out of the way and brought her mouth next to Alison’s ear—“the Condo King, Livingston Fox.”
7
Greene saw the shock register on Daniel Kennicott’s face as recognition set in. Lindsmore walked up to join the conversation.
“I work here,” Greene said, speaking calmly to his former partner. “It’s my first week on the job. Our shift ended at three-thirty, and I stayed behind to have a beer with my boss, an old friend of mine from high school, Claudio Bassante.”
Kennicott didn’t speak. Greene could tell he was tongue-tied.
Greene angled his body toward Kennicott so that Lindsmore couldn’t see what he was about to do. He caught Kennicott’s eye and made a subtle writing motion with his right hand.
“That’s Bassante,” he said. “B-A-S-S-A-N-T-E.”
Kennicott’s eyes came into focus. He gave Greene a subtle nod, reached for the pen he’d clipped
to the last page he’d used in his notebook—the way Greene always had—and glanced at his watch.
“The time now is,” Kennicott said, beginning to write, “four-twelve p.m.,” he said.
“The 911 call came in at four-oh-one,” Lindsmore said.
“Bassante and I were sitting up on the third floor looking south having a beer,” Greene said. “He stood up and knocked his bottle over the edge and it landed on the second-floor balcony. I went down to the shed in back to get a dustpan and broom to clean it up.”
“Where did Bassante go?” Kennicott asked, making notes.
“Out front. He was waiting for the owner, Livingston Fox, to arrive. Bassante told me Fox hadn’t called ahead of time, which apparently was unusual.”
Greene waited until Kennicott looked back at him. He felt as if they were two actors in an audition, neither of them sure what their character’s motivation was or what their relationship was supposed to be.
“The shed is in the southwest corner, past the two Johnny on the Spots,” Greene said. “They stink in this heat. I walked past them and when I opened the shed door, once my eyes adjusted, I saw the body lying face up in the middle of the floor.”
“What did you do?” Kennicott asked, writing away.
“What I should have done when I found Jennifer. I called 911 on my cell.”
It was his biggest regret. His biggest mistake. Not calling 911 had started all the problems between him and Daniel.
“Right away?” Kennicott asked.
“Immediately. Make sure that’s clear in your notes.”
“It’s clear.”
“I yelled to Bassante and ran to the front of the building. I told him what had happened, and he was stunned.”
“Did you check the body for vital signs?”
It was the right question for a homicide detective to ask. “No. It was obvious he was dead. I didn’t want to contaminate a crime scene, so I didn’t step farther inside.”
“How did you know it was Fox?”
“He’s in the news all the time and his face is plastered over the hoardings surrounding this place and all his other projects in the city.”
Heart of the City Page 3
