Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  “Dan Sharp — private investigations. You own this place?”

  The man’s bravado faltered and died. “I’m Dave Henigar. Yes, this is my operation.” He paused. “Are you a cop?”

  Dan shook his head. “I said ‘private.’ But I’ve got a piece of paper saying I can take that boy” — he pointed at Richard — “with me when I leave.”

  The hard look on Henigar’s face returned, a barely contained fury that proclaimed him a force to be reckoned with. Without the court document, Dan wouldn’t want to be confronting this man. He waved the letter under his nose. The offer to peruse it was turned down again.

  “Believe me,” Dan said. “You’re better off if I take him off your hands, but I’ll call in help from the police if I have to.”

  The man looked over at Richard. Ash fell from his cigar. “He’s just partying with us.”

  “He made a movie for you last month,” Dan said.

  The man’s eyes flashed venom. He barked at Richard. “You — kid! Get over here. Now!”

  Richard scrambled toward them and stood there nervously.

  “This guy says you’re underage. That true?”

  The boy’s eyes flickered at Dan. “No.”

  “Don’t fuck with me,” the man growled.

  “I’m not — I’m eighteen. My name’s Lester Higgins.”

  “His name is Richard Philips,” Dan told the fat man. “He turned fifteen last month and he ran away from home in July.” Dan waved the paper at Richard, and for once someone took it. “Is that you?”

  The boy looked up from the photograph, his face scared. More than just interrupting a party, the boy’s livelihood was being jeopardized. Dan looked around at the others. A mulatto kid stood watching from a corner. Definitely underage, Dan decided. “Hey! How about you? You got ID?”

  Henigar stirred. “He’s mine.”

  Dan turned to him. “Your what?”

  “My son,” he said with a snarl, despite the aura of fear he was giving off at that moment. “And he’s working the camera.”

  “Really? Glad to know you’re using homegrown instead of stealing other people’s kids.” Dan tried for a demonic grin, hoping he looked a little deranged. “I sure hope you haven’t distributed that film yet.” He looked at Richard. “Let’s go.”

  The kid looked at Henigar. “Do I have to?”

  “Get out of here!” came the surly reply.

  Out on the street, Dan opened the car door and shoved the kid inside. He checked to see that no one was following or writing down the licence plate number then got in the driver’s side. The boy sat with his arms wrapped around his chest, pouting. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Too bad. You’re coming with me. And don’t try jumping out at the light,” Dan said. “I’m a fast runner.”

  He started the car. Traffic was light on Danforth at that hour. It was a good two minutes before the boy spoke. “I don’t want to go home. Please! Don’t take me in.”

  “I have to — you’re underage.”

  “Please! Don’t make me go back.”

  Dan stopped the car and put it in neutral. He sat there silently considering.

  A calculating look came over the boy’s face. “I’ll give you a blow job if you let me go.”

  Dan was surprised by the vehemence of his reaction. “Listen, you fucked up little asshole. What you’re doing is illegal and stupid!”

  The kid cringed in the same way Ralph had when Dan kicked at him. He softened when he saw Dan wasn’t going to hit him.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about those guys and their movies,” Dan said, “but you could have sent them to jail for about a million years for lying to them about your age. Do you want to do that? Huh?”

  Richard began to cry. “Don’t take me back home. You have no idea what it’s like…!”

  “Then what should I do with you? Just let you go?”

  “Please? I’ll get a job,” the kid sniffled.

  Dan considered this. He thought about what might happen to this kid if he ended up back home. “Would you stick with it if I did?”

  The kid eyed him sullenly. The rebellion returned. “Would you?”

  Wrong answer, Dan thought. This kid definitely didn’t know how to play his cards. “You’d probably have to, considering I just put you out of business. They won’t touch you now they know your real age.” He was right — the kid’s life was going to be fucked up no matter what he did. “The only thing keeping me from sending you back right now is I met your mother and her charming husband.”

  “You met them?”

  “Yes, I met them. And I wouldn’t wish them on anyone, dead or alive. So you’ve got that going for you. What I want is a guarantee you’re not going to end up dead on some street corner a month from now.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you care?”

  Dan stared at him. What to tell this kid about what he’d seen and done? “Tell me — do you like what you’re doing?”

  “What? The films?”

  “The films. Hooking. Hustling. Selling your body. Are you even gay?”

  A spark of self-respect stole into Richard’s face. “Yes, I’m gay,” he said.

  “Congratulations — at least you know that,” Dan told him. “Do you like having sex with guys for money?”

  The kid looked out the window. “Not really.” His voice faltered. “I got raped once.”

  “Have an HIV test?”

  “Yep. It came back clear.”

  “Bet it was scary waiting for the results, wasn’t it?”

  The defiance returned. “Yeah. So what?”

  “So what? You’re asking me ‘so what?’ Do you want to spend your life having sex with guys who might rape you and infect you with a disease so you can die painfully and early?”

  A hesitant shrug was followed by a long pause. Then, “No. I don’t want to die.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. Then I’ll tell you why I care.” Dan waited till the kid turned to look at him. “I care because twenty years ago, I was you.”

  Richard looked long and hard at Dan, his eyes suspicious but curious. “What do you mean?”

  “Boys Town — Bay and Grosvenor. That was my corner.”

  Richard shot him another look, one of skepticism mixed with awe. “Really?”

  “That’s right. Only I met a guy who helped me out. Otherwise I might still be there. Or dead.”

  Richard sat back in the seat and stared out the windshield. He nodded, as if convincing himself of something. “Okay, so what then?”

  “Ked, this is Lester.”

  “Hi, Lester.”

  Dan eyed his son. Was this too much to spring on him unannounced? “Lester needs a friend right now. You fit the bill.”

  Ked’s face showed something like pride and pleasure all at once. “Cool.”

  Dan turned to Richard, who was now Lester. “You’ll stay here with us. It’s only temporary, until I figure out what I can do for you.”

  Lester nodded. His eyes expressed gratitude, but his tongue was clearly tied in knots at that moment.

  “There’s a spare bed in my room,” Ked said. “Where’s your stuff?”

  Lester looked perplexed. “I, uh, don’t have anything.”

  “That’s okay.”

  A howling came from outside. Ked’s head swivelled toward the window. “I forgot Ralph in the backyard!”

  Ked ran to the door. The dog came bounding in, nearly knocking Lester over. The boy leaned down and wrapped his arms around Ralph’s neck, hands plunged in the gingery fur. “Hey, boy!”

  “Lester, meet Ralph,” Dan said.

  Lester looked up at Dan with the first real smile he’d given all evening. “He’s gorgeous!”

  Dan stole a look at his son. Ked winked back.

  Twenty-Three

  Stalking Cool Blue

  The bedside clock read 3:13 a.m. He’d been lying awake for nearly an hour. It was no use — he wouldn’t get back to sleep with all the
thoughts pursuing him. How had Craig Killingworth vanished without leaving tracks? The poor could vanish without a trace, no banks to chase after them, no tax office to care about the millions in unpaid revenue receipts. Abducted children disappeared, grew up and changed appearance, even became someone else’s child, perhaps without knowing it. The aged and infirm simply became invisible. But how could a well-known man of influence just leave the earth, never to be heard from again?

  A man’s life consisted of certain humdrum routines — getting up and going to work, socializing on weekends, having supper with friends and colleagues, and a million variations on the same themes. You didn’t just drop out and vanish without leaving a trail or at least establishing a new routine elsewhere. The more Dan thought about it, the more he was convinced Craig Killingworth was dead. Wherever he’d gone after getting off the ferry, he probably hadn’t lived long enough to tell anybody about it.

  He went into his office and opened the file. Sometimes repeatedly going over the details of a case drummed something into his brain that he would otherwise have missed. The words here still told him nothing. If there was a clue, he lacked the key to unlock it. He turned to the photographs, scrutinizing them with his magnifying glass. The shot of the stables held his interest. Was it the light in Killingworth’s eyes? The hand on the gelding? No, that wasn’t it. He turned his attention to the background. With a jolt he recognized the container of rat poison on the window ledge — the one he’d seen on his tour of the barn last month, only twenty years younger in the photograph. If he blew it up large enough, he might even be able to read the poison warning. He recalled Trevor’s story of the horses that had died after his Uncle Craig disappeared. Accident or eerie coincidence? Who would want six horses dead, and why?

  Dan thought of Magnus Ferguson and wondered what the now-dead gardener would have had to say about it. Had Killingworth really fired the man for theft or had there been another reason? A love affair with his wife, perhaps? Maybe Craig had disappeared after a violent confrontation gone wrong. Or had Lucille arranged for the gardener to kill her husband, paying him a tidy sum in a yellow envelope? He wouldn’t put it past her. In fact, she might even have done it herself.

  Dan let his imagination wander. How would a woman like Lucille Killingworth kill? Surely not by force. With a gun if she had to, but that was always messy. There’d be traces left behind: blood on a floor, guts splattered on walls and curtains. Not her style. It would be even riskier outdoors where someone might hear or see. The acoustics over the bay would advertise the action for miles. Would rat poison be too gruesome or risky for a woman like Lucille Killingworth? It might explain why she didn’t want her husband found — if he’d been poisoned, his body would still bear traces of it.

  But the other question remained: why the horses?

  When he went back to bed an hour later, the mystery of Craig Killingworth was very much alive in his mind.

  He was only halfway through what was promising to be a long and tiresome day. The computer’s pop-up window cheerfully reminded him that he had his weekly therapy session to look forward to that evening. At seven he closed up shop and walked over to the Harbord Centre, as he did every Thursday. As far as Dan was concerned, there was only one item on the menu today. Martin listened quietly as he described what he’d learned on his stopover in Sudbury.

  “How are you handling it?” was Martin’s non-committal response.

  “Apart from the fact that it seems to have blown my entire world apart? Well enough, I suppose.”

  Martin clasped his hands under his chin. He seemed disposed to relate the revelation to Dan’s buried anger. “Think of your anger as an attempt to shake off a sense of futility, the hopelessness you felt over your mother’s death. Sometimes we blame our anger on the city or the traffic or on other people’s inadequacy. It can even make us strike out at things and people that have no relation to what is really disturbing us. What we’re talking about is an inability to function in the normal world.”

  Dan said nothing.

  “I’d like to refer you to a depression specialist.”

  “I’m not depressed.”

  “You may simply be unaware of it,” Martin persisted. “Perhaps this is the epiphany you need to alert you to that reality.”

  “‘Epiphany.’ You mean a realization?”

  “Yes — when a light goes on and we make connections.”

  “I make connections for a living.”

  Martin stared at him blankly.

  “I connect the dots to find people who go missing from their lives. That’s what I call an epiphany.”

  “I see.”

  Martin reached for his pad. A nagging thought brought Dan full circle. He held up a finger, his brain still formulating the question.

  “How would you know if you had an android for a patient?”

  Martin’s face registered intrigue. For a moment Dan thought he might even smile, but he stopped short of that. “I don’t know. How would I know if I had an android for a patient?”

  “That’s the question,” Dan said. “How do we know if people are really feeling something or if they’re just mimicking an emotion? Can emotions be learned?”

  “The responses can. A clever person might even be able to produce certain physiological reactions deemed appropriate to the circumstance. Tears maybe, or even an increase in blood pressure in a heightened situation. Some people can actually blush on command. But it’s not the same as having a real emotion.”

  Dan’s thoughts were racing. “If you did something you felt guilty about for years, even if it was never found out, how would it register on your subconscious mind?”

  “Are you talking about what happened to you because of your mother’s death?”

  “No, I’m not. I can accept the fact that I was four years old and unaware of what was happening. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life beating myself up over that.”

  Martin’s pen scribbled furiously. He looked up. “It’s hard to say. Guilt has a funny way of disguising itself as other emotions — egotism, a sense of entitlement, anger. Even self-hatred. It’s impossible to predict.”

  “What if you murdered someone?”

  Martin stared. “I still say it’s not possible to predetermine the answer, but my guess is that in the end, if you can’t reconcile it, it would eventually destroy you.”

  Dan pictured Lucille Killingworth’s frozen smile. “But what if you’re incapable of feeling emotion? No remorse?”

  “Then maybe nothing would come of it, except the person might retreat further into a lack of genuine emotional responses. There are adults who never mature emotionally. They look and act like other people, but on an affective level they’re very childlike.”

  “Immaturity?”

  “It’s more like an emotional retardation. These are people who don’t feel the same things the rest of us feel. Lacking empathy, for example. Usually they learn to hide their responses. They become adept at masking how they really feel, giving expression to what they think we want to see.”

  Dan thought of Lucille Killingworth’s artificial manners and tempered speech, her convincingly feigned dismay when Dan told her of Daniella’s pregnancy. Her reactions had seemed real, despite being manufactured. Everything cool and restrained. But what, he was thinking, if you pushed her over the edge? What would happen then? Would she do or say anything to give herself away? What would it take to see that side of her?

  Out on the street, Dan tossed away Martin’s script for the specialist and put in a call to Trevor. His voice mail answered. Dan left a greeting, saying he was doing well and asking Trevor to reply to his question when he had a moment. If he didn’t answer his cell, Dan said, then he was in transit and the call would forward home. He apologized for the unusual question but said it was important. He felt odd about asking, though he was already sure he knew the answer.

  Trevor’s reply was waiting on the machine when he got home. He’d called his mother to make sure
. The answer wasn’t what Dan had expected, but it still fit his hypothesis. Maybe even better than he’d hoped. Dan dialled Donny’s number. His friend sounded calm, proudly telling Dan how he’d decided not to panic. There was plenty of time to look for a job, he said, though a vacation still wasn’t in the works, as far as he could see.

  Dan listened politely before changing the subject. “Question,” Dan said.

  “Shoot.”

  “If you were a woman …”

  “If?”

  “Okay. If you were a very wealthy woman …”

  “Ah!”

  “And you wanted to get rid of an abusive bastard of a husband….”

  “It’s getting better — keep going.”

  “How would you kill him?”

  There wasn’t even a pause. “I’d hire a hit man: Tracey Ullman in I Love You To Death. Or maybe I’d get my lover to do it, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Or better yet, we’d do it together and then I’d die in a car crash, ironically leaving my lover to be convicted of killing me: Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

  “Okay, let’s rethink this. You live in a small town where everyone knows you and there are no hit men, maybe even no lovers. Then how would you do it?”

  Donny thought this over. “First of all, I’d never live there, if there is such a place. And if there is, it’s got to be in Saskatchewan. Second, I’d probably poison him and make it look like an accident.”

  “Me, too. Okay, where would you hide the body?”

  “I wouldn’t. The death already looks accidental, right?”

  “What if you killed him somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, so you had to get rid of the evidence?”

  “That’s too difficult. I’d need to know the area to find a place that would be fair game for anyone to go, and where he might just end up getting poisoned all by himself.”

  “Exactly!”

  “What film is this?”