This Thing of Darkness

by Barbara Fradkin

  Green felt a flash of anger. “I’m not assuming. Never assume. Wait for the forensics and autopsy evidence. But so far we do have one piece of evidence from the Rothwell house—that phone message the mother supposedly took. Lou Paquette’s partner found it crumpled up in the waste basket in Caitlin’s room.”

  “But Patrick could have planted it!”

  “That’s why I asked Lou to put a rush on the prints they lifted off it—they belong to the mother, and Caitlin.”

  Levesque frowned. “So she crumpled the note. That’s one little thing.”

  “But it does support Patrick’s story. I had a quick look at Dr. Rosenthal’s notes, and so far what I read also supports Patrick’s story. Rosenthal was obviously worried about Caitlin. Even a full week earlier, he feared she might be headed for a full psychotic break. She was very paranoid about people around her, including him and her father. She was beginning to believe they were black knights of Lucifer, but she was still rational enough to carry out a sophisticated plan of retaliation. He was concerned, in fact, that his minimal doses of medication might be making her more dangerous by keeping her sane enough to carry out her delusions more effectively.”

  “That still doesn’t eliminate her father as a suspect. He already read the notes himself, so of course he’ll make his story consistent. But what about the sexual assault? What about the cabbie picking her up crying and bleeding?”

  “The cabbie said she was half naked, bloody and upset. He assumed the sexual assault, she never said it. The blood on her could have been Rosenthal’s.”

  Levesque grunted in disbelief. “Convenient that the steel pipe and the handbag are both missing. We only have Patrick O’Malley’s word they ever existed.”

  He studied her ruefully. Her head rested against the pillow, her jaw was slack, but unlike him, her thoughts were still clear, and her eyes burned with excitement. Her take on Patrick O’Malley was far less forgiving than his, perhaps because she’d never been a parent struggling to manage a child whose life was careening out of control. Reluctantly he inclined his head to acknowledge her point. “Tomorrow we’ll get another chance at him, Marie Claire. By that time forensics may have more answers, and we’ll have had time to study the files. But for now, your brain needs a rest.”

  To his surprise, Sullivan greeted the theory with equal skepticism. He was sitting up in his guest chair after refusing to lie in bed any longer. Green was hoping the resolution of the case, albeit tragic, would take his mind off himself.

  “So that skin and bones woman managed to beat Rosenthal to death?” Sullivan said.

  “Looks that way.”

  “But using what? Where’s the weapon?”

  Green hesitated. He’d left Levesque grumbling in her ER cubicle, surrounded by snuffles and bandaged limbs, while he’d dropped in for a quick visit to Sullivan. It was nearly midnight, and he’d promised the nurses on his eternal soul not to discuss the case. They hadn’t reckoned with Sullivan, however, who was thirsty for the diversion. Green decided a few more details couldn’t hurt, so he told him about the steel pipe.

  “Tomorrow I’ll order a search of the route she took,” he added, “including the Rideau River below the Montreal Road Bridge. We might get lucky.”

  Sullivan chuckled. “Right. And how many officers do we have to spare for this?” His laughter faded, and he grew thoughtful. “Steel pipe from the house? That sounds almost premeditated.”

  “Apparently she always carried it with her, to help her hear God,” he said, “but I have been playing with the possibility that the murder was planned, at least partly. Let’s assume father’s scenario for the moment. Caitlin discovered that Rosenthal had contacted her father and she became suspicious, so she broke into his house to steal his files. There she found Rosenthal’s notes on how he and her father were planning to have her committed. God knows what her paranoid mind made of that. She would certainly have seen him as a threat in the days before his death. And look at the circumstances of his death. She always went to see him on Friday nights, but that night she didn’t show up. I think she knew he would go out to look for her, and so she was ready with the steel pipe.” Literally God fending off Lucifer, he thought, but kept the more demented elements of the story to himself.

  “But what about Nadif Hassan and company? They’re the ones who started it all.”

  “I’m out on a limb here, but I’m thinking we may have that backwards. I’ve been putting together the bits we know from Screech and Nadif. Screech says he heard her say ‘help, get away from me’. But he didn’t see who she was talking to, because he was hiding. We assumed it was Nadif, but what if it was Rosenthal himself? Nadif also heard her shout for help. He’s fuzzy on the details, because he’s pretty much wasted on some bad street drug, but he says Rosenthal was hassling her, and he and his friends only went in to help.”

  “But Mike, come on! Nadif ’s credibility is—”

  “I know, but let’s see where this goes. Let’s say she was hiding in the alleyway waiting for Rosenthal. When he showed up, he tried to persuade her to come home with him, and they argue. Then she spotted the Somalis coming along the street, noisy and drunk, and she sees her chance to get them involved. So she calls help, screams like she’s being attacked, and in they charge.”

  “So you’re saying she set them up?”

  Green hesitated. He was way beyond the known facts, way beyond his expertise, but it seemed too devious for a devout young woman who believed in the voice of God. “We may never know if it was a deliberate set-up, or if she just wanted their help to fight Lucifer.”

  Sullivan looked dubious, searching for holes in Green’s tattered theory. It almost felt like old times again. “Either way, it sounds mighty clever and well-organized for someone on the brink of psychosis.”

  “I know. I admit there are still a lot of holes to plug. As to her being organized enough to carry out the murder, I’ll leave that to the shrinks to explain. She was psychotic, but she was also very smart. Rosenthal himself said in his notes that his minimal meds might be keeping her just sane enough to be dangerous.”

  “But Mike, that’s a lot of luck, those punks coming along at exactly the right moment.”

  “If they hadn’t, she would have done the job by herself. That was probably her original plan; they just made it easier.”

  “Assuming she’s the killer at all.”

  Green hesitated. “Well...yeah. Bottom line, she was a confused, desperate young woman who thought she was fighting for her life.”

  Sullivan sagged back in his chair with a sigh, and Green felt a stab of concern. He had stayed too long and dragged Sullivan far too deeply into the case. He stood up.

  “Anyway, I should go before the nurses have my head. I told Marie Claire I’d drive her home when they discharge her.”

  Interest flared again in Sullivan’s weary eyes. “How’s she working out?”

  “She’s a pain in the ass. Contrary, controlling, know-it-all...”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Green laughed. “Touché. But she’s not you—”

  “Don’t even go there, Mike. I’m done. The Big Guy sent me that message loud and clear.”

  Green didn’t argue. Midnight, barely two days after a life-threatening ordeal, was not the time to persuade him. Green could afford to wait. If three days of enforced bed rest had Sullivan craving details on the case like an addict his next fix, Green suspected he would persuade himself.

  Twenty-Eight

  The day of Sam Rosenthal’s funeral dawned gloriously sunny and warm. No wind disturbed the gilded, leafy canopy of maples and oaks that stood sentinel over the small community of gravestones in the rural cemetery. Grey squirrels scampered about, snatching acorns and racing up into the trees. Green arrived unexpectedly early, having made good time on the back country roads, and he found the small chapel barely half full. The mostly elderly mourners gathered in clusters and traded hushed gossip about Sam’s life and lurid death.

 
David Rosenthal stood near the front, looking stiff and ill-at-ease as his father’s acquaintances filed past offering condolences. He wore the traditional mourner’s black tie, cut to symbolize the tearing of garments, and it contrasted oddly with his brown cords, suede jacket and steel-toed boots. Standing at least a head taller than the crowd, he spotted Green easily and detached himself to join him. He grabbed Green’s elbow and steered him outside to a private corner of the garden.

  “I was going to call you today. I’ve been a fucking moron the past few days, and I apologize.”

  Green masked his surprise. “I didn’t take it personally, Dr. Rosenthal. Losing a loved one to murder is an awful shock.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never been good at tact. Been told that often enough, starting with my father.” David extricated a thin sheaf of folded papers from his inner jacket pocket. “I found these in my father’s desk. I think they’re as close to a death-bed accusation as you’ll ever get.”

  Green glanced at the dense, handwritten pages. One was an annotated list of people and the other some notes about Caitlin O’Malley, including one dated the night of his death. The handwriting was spidery and difficult to read. “Is this why you went looking for her on Saturday?”

  David’s gaze flickered with surprise. He seemed about to protest, then thought better. “I should have gone to you instead, but I didn’t recognize their significance. I figured that was the list of my father’s beneficiaries, and I wanted to see her for myself, to see if she was conning him.” He shrugged. “That’s my style, Inspector. I see something needs doing, I do it.”

  “Thanks to that style, my best friend is still alive.” Tempted as he was to try to decipher the notes, Green slipped them into his pocket of his leather jacket for later study. He took out a plastic evidence bag. “I have something for you too. It’s broken, but I know a good jeweller.”

  David’s tangled brows shot up. “My mother’s Star of David.”

  Green nodded. “The inscription says To life and hope, my darling. It seems fitting.”

  David took it from the bag and held it up by its chain. It spun lazily. A peculiar mix of resentment and regret flitted across his face. “She didn’t choose life, you know. She hated the chemo. It might have bought her a couple of years, but it made her so sick that she decided what was it worth, this life she had left? So she took up some macrobiotic diet and meditation to fight the cancer with her mind. It didn’t work, but my father told me it gave her the best few months she could have asked for. At the time I was so furious at him, I didn’t even hang around for shiva. But now...”

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel path, and both men turned to see Rabbi Tolner approaching. He looked spry and tanned, wearing a rumpled suit that was now too big for him and a black yarmulke perched on the top of his shiny pate.

  “It’s time, David.”

  Back inside, the funeral was quick. Tolner whipped through the formalities, leading the mourners through some traditional prayers and speaking briefly about his own admiration for the deceased before inviting David Rosenthal up to give the eulogy. David strode to the lectern and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper from his back pocket. Even from a distance, Green could see it was heavily scribbled over in red. The speech had not come easily to him. He smoothed it out, surveyed the crowd of expectant faces and took a deep breath.

  “Most of you are luckier than me. You knew my father. Growing up with Samuel Rosenthal, learned student of the mind, was a challenging task for a little boy who was blessed with his father’s brains and stubbornness but not his wisdom. Like any child, I was self-absorbed and defiant but also hurt by what I felt was the crushing burden of his expectations. My father’s compassion for his patients, his devotion to their care and well-being, his forgiveness of their sins—none of that was accorded to me. I say this not to criticize him but to show how poorly I understood him. Neither my father nor I were very good at explaining ourselves, least of all to each other.”

  Grey heads bent in the congregation, whispers were exchanged and frowns suppressed. The unrest seemed to galvanize David.

  “In the past seventy-two hours, I’ve been reading his private papers and now have an idea where he was coming from. It made me feel better, I’m only sorry it took till now, when he’s gone.

  “I chose a career in biomedical engineering for the simple reason that, although the challenges are huge, the wiring extraordinarily small and the connections infinitely complex, at least they are physical. I can see, touch and manipulate them. The human brain is not only a thousand times more complex, with millions of synapses, receptors, and neurotransmitters interwoven in intricate, precise patterns, but it is overlaid with human consciousness, with interpretation, understanding, and an overarching search for meaning that governs every choice we make.” He glanced up and cleared his throat nervously before returning to his notes. Green had to smile in admiration. The speech was far more polished than the man, proof of what he could do when he brought the full force of his intellect to a task. He pictured David labouring over every word.

  “This is hardly a new idea,” David said. “Religious scholars, existential philosophers and Eastern mystics have been trumpeting the notion for centuries. But in his later years my father tried to cultivate it in that most sterile of soils, modern psychiatry. While most of his colleagues preferred to tinker with receptors and neuro-transmitters through the use of drugs, my father understood that to become truly well, his patients had to stay in charge of that search for meaning. How they understood their world, how they defined their illness and how they chose to manage it was more crucial to their recovery than the right dose of the latest wonder drug.

  “I don’t think he was foolish enough to believe that mental illness was merely a state of mind or that medication had no role to play, but he came to abhor our pill-popping shortcuts and our tendency to define every deviation from the mean as a disorder to be corrected. Once in my childhood, some doctor diagnosed me as ADHD. This was undoubtedly true, for it caused me a lot of grief—disciplinary trouble in school, conflicts with my parents and friends, for example. It still costs me, in relationships and in financial and career stability. But it is also a gift that allows me greater vision to imagine what’s possible, greater courage to take the needed risks, and greater energy to carry them through. I was perhaps my father’s first guinea pig, to see whether I could understand and channel the challenges of my brain and to incorporate them into who I was and where I was going, rather than simply drugging them away.”

  David’s voice had picked up confidence. The audience unrest was gone now, each listener barely moving as he turned over the page.

  “Paradoxically, a person defined only by their synapses and neuro-transmitters is diminished when an expert deems these physical functions to be defective. That’s why the halls and outpatient waiting rooms of psychiatric hospitals are filled with people who feel like failures. There’s a huge sense of inadequacy that needs to be overcome. My father’s goal was to try to connect with the person inside the illness, to listen to them and to draw out their hopes and fears and challenges. His hope was to be a partner with them to fight for those things they felt were not only healthy and fulfilling but also provided mastery and meaning to their life.

  “Finding that balance was often a case of trial and error, and towards the end, my father recognized he had sometimes tipped the balance too far. Ultimately, such an error cost him his life, and even more tragically, the lives of others. But despite this, I hope we can all applaud the inspiration he provides all of us to look ahead with hope. In his own words, he believed that even inside the darkest, sickest brain, that messy little enigma—the thinking mind—was the ultimate agent of recovery.”

  A message not just for mental illness but for all of us, Green thought as he made his way back to the station after the service. A hokey idea, this need for meaning. For Sullivan, it would determine the ultimate path of his recovery. For Sharon, it rose from deep inside her biolo
gical core—a clarion call that scared the hell out of him. He’d been ambivalent about another child since Sharon’s first subtle hints, but Sullivan’s brush with death had added another layer of doubt which he knew he had to face. Someday.

  For Levesque, however, just beginning her career in major crimes, meaning was all about catching bad guys and making them pay for their assault on social order. She would be waiting at the station to begin the next round of interviews with Patrick O’Malley. He wondered what forensics had uncovered since yesterday, and whether they would ever know what had really happened. Whether there was a bad guy to catch at the end of this chase, or just a series of tragic tales.

  Omar Adams had crept back home late the night before, once the news linking Caitlin to Rosenthal’s death had finally reached him, and his father had brought him into the station himself that morning. Green found them waiting when he arrived back from the funeral. The young man looked gaunt and subdued but no longer so afraid. His father sat at his side, grim and ramrod straight, but with a hint of something new in his eyes. Light.

  “He wants to cooperate,” Frank Adams said. “We had a long talk, and he knows it’s the right thing to do. He still doesn’t remember much, but now at least he knows he didn’t kill that man.”

  “Whatever else I did...” Omar muttered, then shrugged in acceptance as the duty sergeant led him away.

  Charges would have to be laid against him, Nadif and the others. They might not have killed Rosenthal, but they had certainly beaten and robbed him. Without their help, Caitlin might not even have succeeded in her goal. Ultimately the young men needed to be held accountable for their part in the tragedy that had followed. Green doubted it would do much to deter Nadif from his path of crime, but Omar might still be turned around. As with Dr. Rosenthal’s patients, the proper remedy needed to be chosen with care.

  In the squad room, the sense of urgency no longer hung in the air. They were no longer hot on the trail of a villain; Nadif, Omar and Patrick were all in custody, awaiting the interview and forensic results that would construct the case for court. Levesque was busy at her desk, the white bandage already replaced by a much more fashionable flesh-coloured bandaid. She sported two black eyes that made her look wan and frail, but she counteracted the effect by wearing a tailored navy suit and for the first time ever, a subtle pink lip gloss. She’d come prepared for battle against the high-powered, charismatic lawyer.