Heart of the City

by Robert Rotenberg

  Illogical as it seemed, despite the mountain of evidence, Greene still couldn’t see Amberlight as a killer. Something occurred to him. “This revised plan for K2. It must have been the big story Fox wanted to tell my daughter.”

  “We’ll never know.”

  “Maybe Fox was killed because someone didn’t want these new plans to go public.”

  Kennicott shook his head. “Maybe it was the same gang who O. J. Simpson says killed his wife, Nicole.”

  They stared at each other. The silence in the room grew heavy.

  “Ari, go talk to her,” Kennicott said. “We both know what’s at stake here.”

  But Greene could see it in Kennicott’s eyes. It was there. Uncertainty.

  “Thanks,” Greene said, before he walked out.

  What were he and DiPaulo going to do, he wondered as he went down the hallway, if after all this Amberlight still denied she’d murdered Fox?

  54

  “You are going to arrest her, aren’t you?” Fernandez asked as soon as Greene was gone.

  As the lead detective, it was Kennicott’s decision to make. “You mean if she doesn’t confess now?” he said.

  That was the problem. Was he ready to arrest her without a confession and take her to trial? There were other suspects still out there. What about Fox’s father? He wasn’t in the clear. What about one of Fox’s ex-girlfriends? A former employee? And what Greene had said. Why had Fox been acting paranoid lately, and what made him so concerned about keeping this plan secret? If he had been making a deal with Amberlight, then she wasn’t the person he feared. Breaker had warned Kennicott that Fox’s competitors were smart and ruthless. She was convinced one of them had hired a hit man to take him out.

  “You’re the prosecutor,” Kennicott said to Fernandez. “Is what you’ve heard today enough to go to the jury and get a conviction?”

  “It would be an extremely strong case.”

  “What do we lose by waiting a few days? Putting her under twenty-four-hour surveillance?”

  “Do you really want to let her go back to her apartment?” Fernandez asked.

  He had a good point.

  “I’ve held off searching it because I had a hunch she’d try something like she did last night and try to take off,” Kennicott said. “If we’d gone into her place with a search warrant earlier, it would have tipped her off. Now we can get one. If she killed him, she could still have some blood on the clothes she wore on Friday.”

  “There could be more,” Fernandez said. “We might find something on her computer, in her garbage can, her filing cabinet. It always amazes me how criminals don’t get around to throwing out incriminating evidence.”

  “In this case, she didn’t have much time.”

  “Neither do we,” Fernandez said. “You let her walk out of here now, even if we put her under surveillance around the clock, we lose control.”

  Come on, Daniel, Kennicott thought, time to decide. He turned to Darvesh. “What do you think?”

  “My vote is with Albert. I say we do it now.”

  Kennicott picked up his notebook and tapped it on the table a few times. He stood and the two men stood with him.

  “Are you going to arrest her?” Darvesh asked.

  Kennicott felt a flash of anger. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to arrest someone. But trust me, Kamil, one day when you’re the lead detective, you’ll think you have the perfect suspect. Someone with motive, opportunity, background, who acts suspiciously after the crime. You make the arrest, you put the person on trial, and you are wrong. Dead wrong.”

  Darvesh nodded. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to—”

  “You charge someone with murder. Even if they are totally exonerated, their life is never the same.” And neither is your own life, he thought.

  “What are you going to do if Amberlight doesn’t confess?” Fernandez asked.

  Kennicott tapped the table again with his notebook. He didn’t want to give them an answer because he didn’t have one.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “and talk to our prime suspect.”

  55

  Greene had known Ted DiPaulo for more than twenty years, and he’d never seen the man as angry as he was now with Amberlight.

  “You will not take instructions from anyone,” DiPaulo yelled, pounding the table hard enough to make it shake.

  “I know. I know,” Amberlight cried. “I was so frightened.”

  “But I told you, running away would be the worst possible thing you could do.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you’re wrong. I’ve been a criminal lawyer for a very long time. I understand perfectly well. I know when I have a client who has no concept of the truth or the consequences of lying. And that’s you, every time.”

  Amberlight put her head in her hands and shook it hard.

  “I’ll tell you what happens with clients like you,” DiPaulo said through gritted teeth. “They get convicted. They go to jail. I lose. I hate to lose. When I lose, I don’t sleep for days. And I like to sleep. How can I possibly represent you now?”

  “I messed up.”

  “Messed up? Messed up? You destroyed the whole case. Kennicott played you like a fiddle. All you had to do is what Ari told you to do and what I told you to do.”

  “How was I supposed to know that some kids in the market kicked out one of my back lights? And what was I supposed to do, tell the cops that I tried to get across the border in the middle of the night?”

  DiPaulo jumped up in frustration, kicked back his chair, and walked over to the window. He folded his arms as if somehow they could contain his anger. “Yes. It’s something called the truth. If you’d said to Kennicott, ‘Last night I panicked. It was a stupid thing to do. I tried to drive across the border to go see my sister because I couldn’t take the pressure.’ If you’d just said something like that, then we wouldn’t have a problem.”

  DiPaulo was really going at her. Greene almost felt sorry for Amberlight.

  “I know, I know,” she said.

  “You lied to the police. You lied to me and Ari.”

  “And now no one will ever believe me. But I didn’t kill Fox. I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “I hope that’s true,” DiPaulo said. “But after this, you need to find another lawyer.”

  “What?” Amberlight said, looking up at him. “But Ted—”

  There was a loud rap on the door.

  Amberlight and DiPaulo froze.

  Greene turned his back to them and opened the door. Kennicott, Fernandez, and Darvesh walked in. Their faces were grim, like a jury returning with a guilty verdict.

  Enter the executioner, Greene thought.

  Kennicott’s phone rang. Loud. It was a hotshot.

  He jerked his head toward Greene.

  They both knew what this meant. Another murder in the city.

  Down the hall someone was shrieking. Greene peered out the door. It was, of all people, Francine Hughes. Running toward them.

  “Detective Kennicott, Detective Kennicott!” she was yelling.

  The hotshot rang again. Everything seemed to be happening at once. This whole afternoon had turned into a disaster.

  Greene turned back to the room. Kennicott was answering his phone.

  “Kennicott,” he said. “What have we got?”

  “Detective Kennicott,” Hughes said rushing up to him.

  Kennicott put his palm up to stop her. His eyes never left Greene as he listened. He was turning pale.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “We’re on our way.” He hung up.

  “There’s been another murder,” Hughes said. “Same place where Livingston Fox was killed, the Kensington Gate building site.”

  “What?” DiPaulo said, stepping forward.

  “Daniel?” Greene said to Kennicott. “Who?”

  “Ari,” Kennicott said, holding Greene’s gaze, “I’m sorry. It was your friend Claudio Bassante. He was stabbed through the heart with a rebar.�
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  “Oh no,” Greene said. “Oh no.”

  “In the work shed. The officer on scene says the blood on the floor is fresh. The body is still warm. It looks as if it just happened.”

  Behind Greene he heard a chair scrape against the floor. He turned. It was Amberlight. She was on her feet now, her shoulders back, her chin jutting out.

  “Well,” she said, zeroing in on Kennicott. “I told all of you, I didn’t kill Livingston Fox. As you said, Detective, I’m not under arrest and the door isn’t locked.”

  Greene watched in amazement as, before anyone could move, Amberlight strode right past Kennicott, marched out the door, and disappeared down the hallway.

  MONDAY MORNING

  56

  Greene had a pad and pen out but instead of taking notes he was doodling. Drawing triangles. Big triangles, little triangles, intersecting triangles. Kennicott and Darvesh were sitting on either side of him in the backroom of the Yuens’ Tim Hortons. The table was covered with coffee mugs, plates of breakfast sandwiches, and stacks of paper.

  They’d arranged to meet here at nine this morning, instead of at the office, to avoid having to deal with the bureaucracy. Greene wasn’t officially back on the force, but they all knew he had to be involved, especially since his old friend Claudio Bassante had been murdered. The formalities could wait. The investigation couldn’t.

  Yesterday afternoon, after Kennicott got the hotshot call, the three of them had rushed to the Kensington Gate building site. They’d split up after seeing the murder scene and now they were reporting in.

  Darvesh had done a full background check on Bassante, developed a timeline of his known movements from Friday to Sunday, made a list of key facts and suspects for Fox’s murder. He passed copies of his findings to Greene and Kennicott along with copies of the photos from the crime scene.

  The pictures were hard for Greene to look at, even though he’d already seen Claudio’s body first-hand. Bassante was lying on his back near the entrance to the shed, a rebar stuck through his heart. The front of his face had been bashed in and blood was spattered across the door and the walls. There were also photos of the back gate, open with the combination lock hanging from the handle, as it had been on Friday, when Fox was murdered.

  Though Bassante had been killed the same way Fox had been, it was obvious that this murder was not as well planned. It seemed improvised, done in haste. It looked as if Bassante had opened the shed door and the killer had taken him by surprise and smashed him in the face with a flat, blunt object.

  A cursory search of the building site had turned up a two-by-four hidden behind a pile of debris. Someone had made what looked like a feeble attempt to clean the blood off it, but Greene could easily see the dried residue. Kennicott had sent it and a hair from Bassante’s head out for rush DNA testing, and a few hours later got confirmation that it was a match.

  Greene put the photos down. “Daniel, what have you got?”

  Kennicott opened his notebook. “At 4:08 I contacted Bassante’s ex-wife. I went to see her. His daughters were there too, and I informed them. At 5:30 I put out the press release. Then I followed up in person with everyone I’d met at Omni and they all had alibis that Kamil and his troops checked out. At 10:12 I attended the emergency autopsy, which confirmed our initial theory. Bassante was first hit and then stabbed after he fell. He was probably unconscious when he was killed.”

  Greene closed his eyes. “I hope so,” he said.

  “I went back to the office to assist Kamil. At 6:00 this morning I got a call from Fox’s sister, Gloria. She wants to meet with me. I’m going to the bus station at 10:05.”

  “Do we know where Fox’s parents were yesterday afternoon?”

  “I’ve had surveillance on the place running twenty-four/seven since Friday. Yesterday afternoon at 1:07, Karl Fox went for a bike ride. He headed northwest, away from the city. He was followed at a safe distance. An undercover took a photo of him in the parking lot outside a bookstore in Orangeville at 3:15, where he bought a book and had a drink in the cafe next door. He rode back home, arriving at 5:35. His wife never left the property.”

  Greene hadn’t written a word. He was still doodling triangles. Long skinny ones. Wide short ones. All sorts of odd-shaped ones. “Did Gloria Fox say what she wants to talk to you about?”

  “No, she didn’t want to speak on the phone,” Kennicott said. “It’s an odd family.”

  “Especially the mother,” Darvesh said.

  Greene turned to him. “What else have you got?”

  Darvesh checked his notebook. “Yesterday afternoon officers went door to door throughout the area around College and Spadina and collected security videos from all the nearby stores and found nothing. We checked the empty house on Augusta and it was clean.”

  “How about the person who found the body?” Greene asked.

  Darvesh flipped to a new page in his notebook. “Earl Moffat, twenty-nine years old. Calls himself a freelance musician and part-time barista. He lives in a communal house in the market. He was walking the house dog, a big husky named Fahrenheit, up the alley. Apparently they don’t believe in leashes, and he walks the dog there every afternoon.”

  That accounts for the puddle of dog pee in the alley on Friday, Greene thought.

  “He said when they got near the construction site, the dog started barking like mad and ran through the back gate, which had been left open. Moffat followed the dog, found the body, and called 911.”

  “Does he have any known connection to Fox?”

  “No, except he was at the protest on Friday. One of the officers went through outtakes of the TV crews and found him there, with the dog.”

  “What about Amberlight?” Greene asked Kennicott.

  “We put a tail on her yesterday when she walked out of the station, and we’ve had her under surveillance ever since. She went home and hasn’t come out.”

  Greene’s triangles were getting denser and denser, piling one on top of the other until he’d filled almost every inch of empty space. “Okay,” he said, turning to a fresh page. “We have to be missing something. Back to square one. Why did Claudio go to the shed?”

  “To talk to someone who turned out to be the killer,” Kennicott said.

  “And this person,” Greene said, putting his pen down and looking at Kennicott. “It had to be a someone who Claudio knew because . . .”

  “Because Bassante must have unlocked the back gate and then left it open for the murderer,” Kennicott said.

  “Exactly.” Greene turned to Darvesh. “And why did this person want Bassante dead?”

  “Because they’d killed Fox,” Darvesh said.

  “And?” Greene asked.

  “Maybe Bassante had come close to figuring out who the killer was,” Darvesh said.

  “And why this murder of Claudio was done in such haste,” Greene said. An idea occurred to him. It seemed so simple. “Maybe,” he said, “we’ve been looking too far afield. Maybe we need to start looking closer to home.”

  He picked up his pen again. “Do you remember what Fox’s sister said about her brother at the midnight ceremony?”

  “That she would always love him,” Darvesh said.

  Greene wrote the words out that Claudio had said to him when they’d met at his condo. They’d been echoing in his head for hours: Follow the money. “What else did the sister say?”

  “That she’d spread his ashes after he is cremated.”

  “Where?”

  “At every building he’d ever built and that his company ever would build.” Kennicott’s eyes lit up. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Greene closed his notebook.

  “I don’t understand,” Darvesh said.

  “The website,” Greene said. “It lists every Fox building and the ones still in the planning stage, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “Do you have a printout?”

  Darvesh passed him some papers. “Yes, right here.”


  “Good work, Kamil,” Greene said.

  Darvesh looked back and forth between them, confused.

  “Daniel, go meet with Fox’s sister and find out what she has to say,” Greene said. “There’s someone I’ve got to see right away.”

  57

  “Thank you for coming to meet me,” Gloria said when Kennicott greeted her at the bus station. Even though it was still warm out, she was wearing a bulky sweater. “I have something important to tell you. Is there a place where we can talk alone?” Her voice was soft.

  “There are a few coffee shops nearby. We can find a quiet one.”

  She shook her head. “No, thank you. Is there a park or someplace where we could go? I don’t like the city. Too many cars and people.”

  Kennicott thought for a moment. There weren’t any parks nearby in the downtown core, and the nearest open space was Nathan Phillips Square in front of city hall, which, even at this time of day, would be filled with people.

  “I know a bench that’s tucked away. Quite private. It’s just a few minutes from here.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  She didn’t say a word as they walked. The bench was in the side courtyard of the Faculty of Dentistry on Edward Street. Kennicott had stumbled on it when he’d last met with Jo Summers, a Crown attorney whom he’d come close to getting romantically involved with. It was on this bench that she’d told him she was moving to Vancouver with her new boyfriend.

  “I have to tell you a secret. Can you promise me you won’t tell my father?” Gloria said when they were seated.

  It was a strange question for a woman in her forties to ask. “Of course.”

  “He knows I came down to talk to you but he doesn’t know that I’m leaving Foxhole.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Yes, finally. I have to. Maxine convinced me. She’s going to take me to a safe place. She’s picking up Livingston’s ashes this morning. I’m meeting her at the office at noon. She’s going to drive me around to every one of his buildings and I’m going to spread a little handful at each one.”

  Her eyes were unfocused. She kept looking around.