Behind all this, Dan’s greatest fear was that he might inadvertently return someone to a scenario that would lead to further harm on the missing person’s part. What if the reason for running away was to escape abuse? What if restoring someone to his or her family led to suicide or murder? What if, what if, and again what if? These were the questions that haunted him.
Dan knew he wasn’t the only one with such thoughts weighing heavily on him. Similar doubts clouded the minds of some of the best police officers he’d met and worked with. They lived with the knowledge that locating a missing person in time could mean the difference between life and death. All too often the crucial hours slipped by because of negligence of one sort or another. Paperwork not done in time, messages not forwarded, subtler clues overlooked in favour of more obvious ones that led nowhere. Sometimes an outdated photograph meant a face wouldn’t be recognized immediately. Or it might be the neighbour not questioned soon enough to prevent a twelve-year-old from being suffocated and stuffed into a green garbage bag inside a refrigerator in a rooming house on the street where she’d vanished a week earlier. It was the stuff of nightmares come alive: lions prowling in the streets, tanks rolling down hills into your village. There was always a fear that the one thing overlooked, the simplest effort not made, or the question left unasked meant someone would die or that a killer would escape. That was not far off the truth.
He’d talked to such cops. “There is no such thing as closure,” they’d told him. “You can dehumanize things on the surface, but not deep down. You want to cut off the feelings, but you can’t.” They talked of vics and perps, not real people. They obsessed over physical details and tried to forget the names and faces, but their own faces marked them as haunted. Dan saw it. “You have to detach yourself,” they told him. “You have to look at things objectively.” But not one ever told him they’d been successful at it.
These bustling, over-exuberant tough guys and gals were all live-wired inside. Scarred by what they’d seen, their emotions caught in a precarious tightrope over an abyss, they walked and sometimes they fell. Like Constable Brian Lawrie, who left the force ten days after pulling the body of Sharin’ Keenan Morningstar from the refrigerator of a rooming house in the Annex. For him it was “one crime scene too many,” after being struck by how shiny her hair was when he found her stuffed in that garbage bag. Or his partner, Detective Mike Pedley, who followed the trail of her killer for years, always feeling himself just one step behind until he threw himself under the wheels of a subway train at Rosedale Station on an otherwise bright, upbeat sunny day.
Dan knew the men and women who worked on child murder cases were a breed apart, to use a cliché still deserved in many ways. “It’s the living you have to worry about, not the dead,” they said, if only to convince themselves. They referred to human remains as “trash” in an effort to make it less hurtful. “No offence intended to the deceased,” they said. “We just can’t take it personally.” Dan understood. It was the language they used, but it was slight as far as armour went. He thought about the boy he’d been, the one who grew up tortured because he didn’t know what to feel on hearing of his own mother’s death, hating himself because at four he’d been calculating the advantages he might gain in sympathy from others rather than feeling sorry for her. There was always that particular brand of torture.
Dan’s other great fear was of making the opposite kind of mistake. Of declaring the wrong person dead or, worse, speaking too soon and declaring the wrong person still alive. His gut instinct told him he’d found Darryl Hillary rather than some other unfortunate as he stared up at the body hanging from a meat hook, but logic told him not to jump to conclusions. In this case it might simply mean delaying the delivery of bad news another day, if bad news it turned out to be. One more day for Darryl Hillary’s sister to live in hope. Was that such a bad thing? Sometimes not seeing was believing. Often, the relatives of victims preferred not to learn the truth, to go on believing their loved one was still in the land of the living even when all the evidence, forensic and otherwise, told a different story.
He took a last sip of coffee and looked down at his phone, his thumb rolling through the listings till he found the number for Darlene Hillary.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Ms. Hillary?”
“Darlene, yes.”
“It’s Dan Sharp.”
He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You found Darryl?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m calling.”
The voice turned hard. “What does that mean?”
“It means the man I found hasn’t been identified yet.”
“I don’t understand. Oh, you mean he’s ...”
Dan felt the weariness overtake him. “A body has been found, but no identification has been made.”
“He’s dead then.”
The voice sounded like a sack of wet cement hitting the ground. Dan sensed the instinctive clenching, the withdrawal that occurred when the news was bad. She was remarkably contained.
“I prefer not to jump to conclusions. We don’t know for sure, so there’s still reason to hope.” He paused to let that sink in. “I was wondering if you would know the name of Darryl’s dentist. I’d like to get his dental records to see if we can rule out the possibility that it is your brother.”
There was a hesitation. “I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. You want to know Darryl’s dentist’s name?”
“Yes, if you know it.”
“I don’t think he had one. Not in Toronto.”
A total recluse, Dan thought.
“What about before that? A childhood dentist maybe?”
“There was a dentist in Timmins. We both went to him. But that was years ago.”
“The records could still help us.”
She was suddenly suspicious. “Who is ‘us’?”
“The Toronto police.” He pulled his dressing gown tighter.
Another pause. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. The dentist, I mean.”
“It’s worth a try,” Dan said, shielding his face from the sun with his hand.
“Just a minute and I’ll see if I can find my old address book.”
He heard her shuffling off. He sipped his coffee and waited. She returned in less than a minute.
“I have it here,” she said. “I keep everything.”
As she relayed the information in a halting voice, Dan wrote down the particulars.
“I’m sorry I have to ask,” he said, “but you mentioned that Darryl smoked drugs. As far as you know, does your brother have drug debts?”
“I don’t think he has anything like that. I know he liked to smoke marijuana once in a while, but I don’t think he was mixed up in anything like that.”
He thanked her and hung up then called directory assistance in Timmins. The operator was unable to locate the dentist in question. She offered to look back several years till she found the name. Not much to do, Dan concluded, accepting her offer to help. The answer came quickly enough: the number had been delisted ten years previously.
He’d just clapped his cellphone closed when it rang again. He saw the name Hillary on his screen.
“He has a gold cap,” she declared without preamble. “I just thought of it. It’s on one of the lower front teeth. You can’t really see it much except when he smiles. I hope that helps you.”
“Yes, it’s a great help,” Dan said, trying to picture the dangling monster smiling at him. It was an eerie thought. Or maybe the gold tooth had been removed along with the left ear. Perhaps it was a psychopathic gold prospector the police should be looking for. “With any luck, it should tell us what we need to know. Thank you very much.”
He finished his coffee without any further interruptions then went inside to dress.
The Centre of Forensic Sciences on Grosvenor Street was the largest laboratory of its kind in Canada. At any given moment, it employed more than two hundred and fifty personnel. Its slogan w
as Scientia pro justicia: “Science for justice.” Working neither for the law nor against it, the centre was supposed to be as impartial as death. At any rate, that was its claim.
Dan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the coolness of a wall. His stomach, no longer grateful for the late-night Wendy’s combo, had been rumbling for the past hour, demanding breakfast while the rest of him just wanted to go back to sleep. In the main-floor bathroom, he rinsed his face with cool water and surveyed the rugged landscape that constituted his features: jagged nose, brooding eyes under dark brows, broad cheekbones, and powerful chin. A red sickle ran from below the right eye up to his temple, arresting the viewer’s gaze before granting permission to go further. It was a lasting gift from his father for coming home from school late when Dan was ten.
He pulled on the paper towels. At first they refused to give way before giving way far too easily and flooding the floor with brown sheets folded in half. He stooped to pick them up and left them on the counter for the next person who came along, presuming that person wouldn’t be too picky about his drying towels. After all, you never knew where they’d been.
He came back out and sat in reception. A clock ticked at the far end of the hall. Somnolent, hypnotic, it was a reminder to the living of what no longer existed for the dead arrayed for viewing one floor below. He stared at it, his gaze blanking dully before the numbers registered.
Time.
Clock.
Morning.
He’d left the slaughterhouse seven hours ago. Three hours before that he’d been passing a quiet night with Trevor and Ked until it got interrupted. Was it not ironic to be sitting in the hallway of the Toronto morgue waiting to meet a corpse after spending the evening watching The Exorcist?
He stood and paced. Sitting was out of the question if he wanted to stay awake. A green brochure on a magazine stand caught his eye. He scanned the shiny chrome tables on the cover, turned the page and browsed the paragraphs outlining the manufacturer’s specifications for modular mortuaries. He’d never heard of such things.
Fascinated, he read the jaunty, upbeat descriptions of “stand-alone, self-contained plant rooms” that would prove “ideal for any contemporary disaster situation.” The rooms in the images were pristine. No bodies under sheets, no trails of blood or dismembered limbs lying on the floor. No doctors and nurses running around with worn expressions as the body count from the latest suicide bombing or train wreck piled up, proving just how far from ideal any contemporary disaster situation was likely to be.
Dan had visited dozens of morgues over his fifteen-year career. Like cemeteries, he found them to be lack-
lustre places, as opposed to the creepy television portrayals with their atmosphere of incipient doom. Hospitals were far more threatening to his peace of mind.
He’d once looked up the meaning of “morgue,” intrigued by its similarity to the French mort or “dead.” Surprisingly, the words were unrelated. It meant “to look at solemnly.” Even more surprising were the associated synonyms of condescension, disdain, and pride. An unusual usage, Dan thought as he read on, only to learn that in its original form a morgue was a room in a prison where jailers studied the newly convicted to help identify them in future. It was only later, in the fifteenth century, that the word came to designate a room used for cold storage of bodies.
Not to be outdone, the ever-colourful Brits came up with their own euphemisms: “Rose Cottage” and “Rainbow Room,” which allowed doctors to discuss such matters freely in front of worried patients.
In one of the first detective stories, Edgar Allan Poe had written famously of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Since then, few had bettered his creative ingenuity. Without realizing it, he’d established a number of crime fiction conventions, including that of the eccentric but brilliant problem solver, an ineffectual police force, and what was to become known as the “locked room mystery.” That single work changed
the course of literary history, though its author thought
little of it other than to say he felt its popularity stemmed from being “something in a new key.” Novelty
or not, it earned him a substantial fee of $56 on publication in 1841, adding a further brick in the wall of Poe’s literary immortality. That, of course, was after a lifetime of financial hardship, but before being murdered at forty and defamed posthumously by his literary executor. Was his reputation as a great writer any consolation to him now?
Dan settled in for a long wait. Every once in a while someone in a uniform came through the hall and tossed him a sympathetic smile, telling him it would be just another few minutes, before disappearing down the corridor and around a corner that hid the aftermath of who knew what disasters, ideal or otherwise?
At ten thirty, a technician came by. He did a double take and turned back to Dan.
“Hey, sexy. Fancy meeting you here.”
Dan looked up and smiled. “Howard. How are you?”
“Missing being in your loving arms, but otherwise doing very well. How are things? How is, um — Kedrick?”
“Good memory. We’re both well, thanks. It’s been a while.”
“It has, hasn’t it?” A spurt of embarrassment showed on Howard’s face. “Sorry about that last time we were together. I guess I was a little jealous or something.”
Dan shook his head. “Don’t mention it.”
“Did the beer stains come out of your jacket?”
Dan smiled. “Pretty much. So how did you come to be working in the city morgue? Didn’t you use to work in film?”
Howard made a face. “Precisely. I used to do hair and make-up, but I find this far less stressful.”
“Are you kidding?”
Howard gave him a rueful look. “Have you ever worked with actors?”
“Thankfully, no.”
Howard checked his clipboard. “Say, you’re not waiting for unit three, are you? The murder vic from the slaughterhouse?”
Dan nodded, suddenly alert. “That’s me.”
“Come on down the hall. They’re nearly finished,” Howard told him. “I can probably sneak you in if we’re quiet.”
“I think you said something like that the last time we saw each other,” Dan said with a wink.
“Still a cheeky boy.”
Dan followed him to a set of double doors with a red light blinking overhead. Howard turned the knob and peered through the crack. He waved Dan in after him.
The body lay on a table, covered by a sheet up to the shoulders, leaving the head exposed. From across the room, Dan could make out the severed ear base, the dried blood turned black and grimy.
There were three men in the room. The first, clearly
a morgue attendant, carried a clipboard loosely under his arm. The second was the fleshy cop from the slaughterhouse last night. Probably continuity, Dan decided. He would have stayed with the body until the autopsy was completed to provide a continuity of evidence. In other words, so that no one could sneak in and fiddle about with the remains. Once that was done, the body would be sealed in a bag and left undisturbed till it was released to family. The other officer was new. He was smooth-faced and boyish, almost pretty. He’d have had a hard time in the training academy, Dan thought. Probably needed to prove himself at all times. His longish hair was slicked back Latino-style. Definitely not a regulation haircut.
Both cops were consulting sheets, making marks as the coroner told them his findings. They were as unlikely a pair as Jack Spratt and his lean-hating wife, the one small-framed and tidy, the other oversized and as unkempt as they came. The lumpy officer looked as though he’d never learned to tuck in his shirttails or iron his trousers. Even his boots were scuffed, the laces loosely tied.
“We’re almost finished,” said the morgue attendant, glancing over at Dan and Howard. “You can come in.”
The two cops glanced over with disdain, reminding Dan of the original meaning of the word “morgue.” Toronto cops had a reputation for being arrogant. To a d
egree it was deserved, but not by all. Dan had heard that small town cops resented them for making them all look bad. He’d met his share of cops. For the most part, he could take or leave them. Many were just ordinary folks off the beat, but some had a hardened attitude, as though they felt hard done by and ready to take it out on anybody who gave them cause. As if somebody had forced them to enter the ranks.
Apart from his size, the larger cop was nondescript. If he had the nerve for it, he’d probably be successful working undercover. He could take on any disguise with that doughboy face, potbelly, and stooped shoulders. With minimal effort, he might easily be mistaken for a truck driver, construction worker, or even a biker.
The other barely looked old enough to be a cop.
He was chewing gum, making loud smacking noises. His small stature emphasized his cocky attitude, as though he needed to make up in presence what he lacked in size. His eyes were green. Envy, zealotry, hard to tell. He had a girl’s nose and pouting lips. His hair, thick and honey-blonde, was the kind that seldom made it to middle age without receding, usually along with a sagging middle.
The larger cop said something to his partner, who turned to regard Dan with greater interest.
“You the one that found him?” he threw out.
“Yes, I am.”
“Missing persons investigator, I understand?”
“Correct,” Dan said. He could almost hear him thinking, Wannabe cop.
The officer turned away as though he couldn’t possibly be of further interest.
“I have some information that might help identify the victim,” Dan offered.
Both officers turned to him.
“What would that be, sir?” asked the larger one.
“I spoke with my client this morning. The man I’m searching for — Darryl Hillary — has a gold-capped lower incisor.”
“Well, you’re too late. We already know who this guy is,” replied the younger officer with more than a hint of surliness. “We got his fingerprints on file.”
Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 39
