No response.
I leave, feeling like a jerk. But a jerk with the image of Elizabeth’s naked body permanently tattooed into my neurons.
As I head down the path I notice that the white Lexus is gone.
38
Cal
Both Mark Wright’s cellphones are switched off but Forensics are monitoring them for any activity. They are also looking into his financial records for any payments that might pinpoint his location. Meanwhile, I am sitting on my thumbs in the plush reception area, waiting for Harold Varga to grant me an audience.
There still is no trace of the truck that killed Marguerite Varga and despite Inspector Vance’s skepticism about the connection between the cases, it is all I have to go on.
“Detective Rogan.” He is standing there in another expensive suit. “I can only spare you fifteen minutes as I have a lunch appointment. Follow me.” Without offering his hand, he turns and stalks down the corridor to his office.
Instead of offering me a seat on the leather chairs in the corner of the office, he points to one of the guest chairs at his desk. When he sits, I notice that his chair is adjusted so that his eye level is above mine.
“Mr. Varga, who might have known that your wife was going to be on the way to her church on the evening she was killed?”
“People from the church I suppose… and me. No-one else that I can think of.”
“What about Mark Wright?”
I watch his face like a hawk. Dropping Mark’s name into the conversation, completely out of context, has the desired effect. I see shock, then consternation, or is it fear? Then it is replaced by anger.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I mean, did Mark Wright know that your wife went to the church every Sunday night?”
“No of course not, unless Elizabeth told him. But Mark couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with my wife’s murder. He was—”
“He was what, sir?” I ask.
“He was… uh, distraught over his son being missing. He would have been waiting at home for any news.”
I love it when a plan comes together. “So you and Mark have been in frequent contact with each other.”
He sees the trap he has fallen into and I see light refracting through a tiny bead of perspiration on his forehead. “Well, I uh, wouldn’t say frequent but we talked from time to time.”
“Frequent enough that you knew the details of his son’s disappearance and subsequent murder.”
“Well… yes.”
Now for the long shot. “What do you know about the oboe is blood code?”
Home run. All the blood drains from his face.
“The what?” he asks.
“Mr. Varga, I think it is about time for you to come clean. We know what the code means.”
He stares at me and I can see the conflicts wrestling behind his eyes. Then his face calms. The bluff worked; he is going to tell all.
“OK, Detective Rogan. I have had about enough of this. I am going to ask you to leave right now. I will be putting a call through to my good friend Superintendent Cathcart to complain about your inept handling of this investigation. Kindly leave now.”
So much for that bluff working.
He stands. I don’t.
I just look at him. Maybe the first bluff did not work but in a minute, I will ask him to accompany me to the police station.
My phone vibrates. Without breaking eye contact, I take it from my pocket and press the green talk button.
“Rogan.”
The five words I hear change everything.
39
Cal
At last the frustration is over; we are going in now.
For over ninety minutes, I sat in the car a block from the Golden Motel waiting for backup from Tactical Support and worrying that at any moment he could decide to run. The only thing that kept me from disobeying Steve’s order to stay out of sight and not go in alone, was the slim chance that Mark Wright may be armed. A one-on-one armed confrontation runs the risk of the suspect coming out on top and escaping, with his gun, into the world at large. And something else is scratching at my mind. I’m missing something; I can’t put my finger on it but it feels like it’s important.
At a whispered command, one officer swings the ram and the door flies open, he steps back so that two of his colleagues and I can enter fast.
The first thing I see is the gun in Wright’s hand, a Browning, identical to the one that I used to carry before the department changed over to the Sig Sauer, except it has a silencer. Where would a computer guy get a handgun with a silencer in Canada? The silencer is covered in blood. The headboard and the wall are spattered with the contents of Wright’s cranium, forming an unholy halo.
I walk over and can smell the recently discharged weapon. The body is warm. He died while I was waiting outside.
The congratulations of Steve and Inspector Vance feel hollow. I may have closed the Terry Wright case but, if I had disobeyed orders, I could have gone in before Mark killed himself and we would have the killer in custody. Now I have to face his wife, my new lover, and tell her that her husband is dead and that I could have saved him.
She opens the door and is looking stunning in the same dress that she wore earlier. She takes my hand and draws me inside. As soon as the door closes, she kisses me and I can feel the urgency in her body. She breaks the kiss. “Did you find Mark? Was he still there?”
“Yes.” I lead her into the living room and sit her down. Before I tell her, I have questions that must be answered.
“Tell me exactly what was said in your phone call from Mark.”
“He told me that some people were after him, criminals. He said he had enough money for him and me to get away together; that I should pack a bag and come to the Golden Motel. I told him that I would come as soon as I could. Then I hung up and called you.”
“Did he say why these criminals were after him?”
“No. He just said that they were bad, very bad.”
“How did he sound when you told him you would go with him?”
“Relieved. Excited, I suppose. He told me to hurry.”
A worm of unease is slithering in my gut. There’s something wrong with this story.
“How long were you on the phone to him?”
“I don’t know. Two minutes maybe.”
“Did Mark have a gun?”
She emits a harsh laugh. “A gun? Mark? No. Of course not.” She sounds very sure. “Why?”
The worm becomes a viper.
It’s time to come clean. I sit down beside her and take her hand in both of mine.
For the first time I notice that the haunting chants are playing on the CD player. Will her religious beliefs be strong enough to get her through this? “When we got to the motel, Mark was dead. It looks like suicide.”
She is silent, motionless, just staring at the wall. Five seconds. Ten. A lone tear furrows her cheek. Then another. She extracts her hand from mine, covers her face with both hands and slumps forward, sobbing into her lap. I try to console her by gently rubbing her back. Through the dress, I can feel that she is not wearing a bra and feel ashamed at the excitement this generates in me.
“Why?” she sobs. “Whyyyyyy?”
“We have reason to believe that he may have killed Terry.”
She continues sobbing but there is no denial.
40
Stammo
I gotta stop myself getting bitter about it. Maybe the fuckin’ doctors are wrong. I’ve been hurt before, shit, I was shot more’n once and I bounced back. There’s no way I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. No way!
But either way, the job’s gone. Shit!
Shit! Shit! Shit!
I’m squeezing my hand so tight, I can feel the metal of the locket cutting into my palm.
“Can we come in?” It’s Rogan. He’s got his kid with him.
“Hi Nick, how are you feeling?” I can tell from his face he kno
ws my prognosis.
“Hi Mr. Stammo,” Ellie says with a shy little smile. It’s the best thing I’ve seen all day… by far.
“Hi honey, how are you?”
“Good.” She smiles again and I can’t help smiling back.
She’s holding a big bunch of flowers in a vase.
“Put them here El,” Rogan guides her to the window, “where Mr. Stammo can see them.”
Mr. Stammo. That’s what people will be calling me from now on, not Detective Stammo. Not anymore. The thought’s more painful than the pains in my body; the drugs keep those in check. For the first time in my life, I can see why people might take drugs to dull the pain in their mind. Is that what started Rogan on heroin all them years ago?
Ellie sits in the visitor chair with one of them electronic book things. Why would anyone take drugs when they’ve got a little angel like her to come home to?
“Tonight’s my night with Ellie; I just picked her up from after-school care.”
I nod. Seeing her reminds me of my own kids. I haven’t seen them since… Now I’m going to have more time on my hands, maybe I’ll go visit them in Toronto… wheelchair and all. Maybe.
Rogan breaks the silence. “Nick, I’m sorry. The driver, I should have put her out of commission, it’s my fault you’re…”
“Forget it, Rogan. It wasn’t your fault. When you threw her outta the SUV, I could hear the bone snap from where I was.” I look at Ellie, I hope she didn’t hear that. She seems lost in her book but I better be careful I don’t swear or say anything else that might upset her. “No-one would’a thought that she’d be able to get up again,” I continue, “let alone get back in the driver’s seat. You did the right thing to go after the one with the kid.”
“Thanks, Nick, it’s just…” He looks down at my legs, covered up by the blankets but I can see the relief wash over his face. “They’re pulling out all the stops trying to find those women and that SUV. Michael Chan gave us the number plate but it was stolen. We’re going to get them, Nick. I promise you.”
The silence is awkward. We both know that’s a promise it’s gonna be difficult to keep. He looks at Ellie and a smile comes over his face for a moment. Then it changes. He’s pumping up his courage to say something and I got a pretty good idea what it is.
“Why did you take that urine test for me, Nick?” His voice is very quiet. “How did you know?”
Maybe I should tell him. I got nothing to lose now. He deserves to know the truth, ’though I’m not too sure how he’s gonna take it. He blows up real easy. But I want him to know that I didn’t have anything to do with it, that I didn’t find out about it until after. I think for a bit about how to explain it and I can tell he’s getting impatient.
“It’s like this, Rogan. I haven’t always been the straightest of cops. Over the years, I done some things I ain’t too proud of but I want you to know that I would never—”
“I knew it.” He cuts me off with a snarl. “You sold me out. You made it pretty clear that you didn’t want me in the Department, so you sold me out to some drug gang so they could pump me full of dope and get me hooked again. How much did they pay you Nick?”
“What the f—” I cut myself off. I don’t want to swear in front of little Ellie. “What the heck are you talking about, Rogan. If I’d sold you out why would I take the f—, why would I take the test for you.”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you felt guilty.”
Screw him. Bastard thinks I’ve been taking money from some gang. Screw him! He can find out who did it himself.
I fix my eyes on him. “I think you’d better go now, Rogan.”
He can see he’s fucked it up. “I’m sorry, Nick,” he says. “I shouldn’t have accused you like that. It’s just that I’m so angry about it. They gave me another test the day after. The results aren’t back yet but when they are… ”
So I did it for nothing. They got him anyway. He’s going to go from Detective to Mr., just like me.
“Who was it, Nick? Who did it to me?”
I just shake my head and point at the door. “Now,” I say.
He takes Ellie’s hand and leads her out. She turns and waves and gives me a huge smile; it makes a tear spring to me eye. Shit, I haven’t cried in years. I blink it away and stroke the locket in my palm.
41
Cal
Thursday
I can hardly contain my impatience. I am sitting on an expensive, soft leather couch in a room that takes up the whole floor. The desks are packed together and occupied by people, predominantly male, each with a bank of three computer monitors in front of him, deeply engrossed in work. The walls are exposed brick and the ancient beams are as they were when this was an industrial warehouse. In other words, it is a typical Gastown high tech company.
After dropping off Ellie at school, I am here at Damien’s office in answer to his text: I know what oboe means. It’s HUGE. Although I called him first, he refused to discuss it over the phone, saying it was too sensitive to discuss on a cell, so now I’m here on tenterhooks. A tattooed and leather-clad receptionist with red and green streaks in her jet black hair—reminiscent of Damien’s past—has asked me to take a seat and wait.
I need to take another handful of Tylenol. The withdrawal pains are no longer crippling but are still painful. I look around and see that there is a large, glass-fronted coffee room behind me. I get up from the luxury of the couch and walk toward it.
I can smell coffee. I take in a deep breath and for a moment, I am transported back to my capture in the disused building in Riverview. It’s the same coffee that permeated the sack which was placed over my head by my captors. It sends off a peal of warning bells.
I try and shake off the thought that Damien could have had anything to do with my kidnapping. It doesn’t make sense. He was in Frankfurt when I was taken. And if it was Damien, how would Stammo know about it. No it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
I enter the coffee room. On a counter there is a drip coffee pot, a Bodum French press, a vacuum flask and a very expensive looking espresso machine. These techies definitely like their coffee. To my surprise, at the end of the counter are two beer taps.
An intense and slightly forbidding looking woman is loading beans from what looks to be a five pound sack into a grinder. This close I can smell the coffee strongly. It is the same. And the sack could easily be a twin of the one that was placed over my head. It has got to be a coincidence. There must be thousands of people who drink this brand of coffee.
“Do you know where this coffee comes from?” I ask.
Her smile completely changes her face and it is captivating. “Yes, I do. It’s quite unusual. It comes from Guatemala, from a fair trade, family plantation. After Damien visited there last year, he brought some back and we have been buying it from a local importer ever since. It’s very good. Would you like a cup?” So, there are not thousands of people drinking this brand.
At my yes, she pours a cup from the vacuum flask. She is right, it is good… and somehow familiar. I take another sip and I know where I have had this before. A chill envelopes me. I am happy that Damien was not involved—that it was indeed a coincidence—but horrified at the truth. It takes all my will power not to leave and go back to VGH and make Stammo come clean.
“Hi, Cal. Sorry to keep you waiting. A conference call with a client in Germany. Good, you’ve got coffee, so come on through.” Damien leads me along a narrow path between the desks and I try to force the thoughts of my capture behind me for the moment and start to wonder what all these people do. I had no idea that Damien’s company was so big. There must be forty people on the floor.
We go into a sparsely furnished corner office and he closes the door. On his desk is one of those Newton’s cradle executive toys. I feel like the middle ball, attacked from both sides and getting nowhere.
As I sit down I realize that I forgot to take the Tylenol but I’ll tough it out for a while.
I can feel my excitem
ent ramping up. When I get fired today—as I almost certainly will—at least I am going to go out in a blaze of glory for solving this element of the crime, the motive for Terry’s death.
He waves his hand toward the people outside his office and says, “They’re all what you would call hackers,” he says. “Some of them have been to jail for hacking into governments’ and corporations’ computers and the others didn’t go to jail because they were too smart to get caught.”
“What are they doing here?” I have an uncomfortable feeling that I have walked into some huge illegal operation, the proverbial den of thieves.
He can read the look on my face and smiles. “Our clients pay us big bucks to try and break their security, hack into their servers, access their data, that kind of stuff. We are paid to pit our wits against the client’s own IT staff to find and report weaknesses that criminal hackers could take advantage of.”
Do companies really do that?
“You have enough clients paying you to hack their systems that you can employ what, forty people?”
“A hundred and thirty, we have the two floors below this one too.” He smiles at my bemusement. “Who’d have thunk it eh?”
I shake my head but don’t feel one hundred percent comfortable with the answer.
“Anyway,” he says, “you didn’t come here to learn about my business; you came here to learn about oboe.”
“I’m all ears.”
“What do you know about encryption?”
“Nothing really; it’s how computers scramble information so that no-one can read it. Something like that?” I feel a bit embarrassed that I’m going to get out of my depth very quickly in this conversation. Three years on the streets left me a bit behind in the world of high tech.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 50
