Within two hours the cop was on his feet again, as Vertesi approached with a large manila folder. He knocked before entering the room, and seeing how dark it was, asked the woman in bed if he could turn on the overhead lights. She said, “Okay.”
Vertesi introduced himself to Lea and her mother and reminded them of the reason for his visit. Using the rolling tray, he went through a series of flashcards of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to road hogs, from scooters to Japanese crotch-rockets.
She said, “Maybe,” several times, but at least it was always to a similar profile: two-stroke dirt bikes and road bikes. “I’m pretty sure it was orange … But then, it was always sunny, so it might have been red … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be—you’re doing great. It’s easy to mix them up.” With each “maybe” Vertesi added to a separate pile of cards. When he’d eliminated all the “no” cards, he started going through the maybes again.
Twenty minutes later he was leaving the hospital with four bikes that qualified as maybes. One was actually blue and white, but Lea thought its profile made it a maybe. She had asked, “What kind of bikes are they?”
“All four are Japanese, but honestly, Lea, I don’t know much about them. Forensics will. You’ve been very helpful. Tell me, did you ever hear it idling or driving away?”
“No, sorry. I remember actually thinking, the first time, maybe it had broken down.”
When he returned to Division, Vertesi dropped the images off with Forensics before heading upstairs. When he reached the cubicle, Williams was leaning over Ryan’s computer. Deputy Chief Wallace was in the middle of a press conference about Lea Nam, much larger than the one he’d held for Ghosh. “They’re asking if there’s any connection between the two attacks,” Williams said.
Wallace didn’t hesitate. “That hasn’t been confirmed. The investigation is still in the early stages. However, nothing has been ruled out.” The cluster of microphones in front of him included two sports networks among the mainstream radio stations and television channels—an acknowledgement of Nam’s celebrity as an athlete. Over his shoulder to the right was MacNeice, who had made the initial announcement before turning over the microphone to the Deputy Chief.
When MacNeice returned to the cubicle, Williams didn’t ask about the press conference but whether his boss had spoken to Wallace about additional help.
“Yes. He said, ‘Speak to your genie, then tell me who you want.’ ”
“Damn—I thought he was the genie,” Williams said.
“So I spoke to the genie.”
“And?” Vertesi asked.
“He said, ‘Tell your boss who you want, but remember the wage freeze.’ ”
“Have you got someone in mind? I mean, Swetsky’s gonna be hunting for the boys who killed the bikers we found above ground, so his team’s going to get bigger, not smaller. And that’s before he gets to the ones wrapped in plastic.”
“I do, but it’s a long shot,” MacNeice said.
“Fiza Aziz!” Vertesi blurted.
“Exactly.”
“No way. D’ya think she’d just up and leave the university?” Williams asked. But he had to concede that, given the circumstances, Fiza Aziz was not only the perfect candidate, she was the only candidate.
“I don’t know.”
“She’s not happy in Ottawa, boss,” Vertesi said. “We’ve been emailing back and forth for the past six months. Aziz was burnt out by our last case together. When the offer to teach criminology came, it just seemed like the right thing to do. But that was then …”
“What about the hiring freeze?” Williams asked.
“I might be able to swing calling her departure a sabbatical, a leave of absence, or possibly even professional development—retroactively.”
“You haven’t called her yet?” Vertesi asked.
“No.”
Williams moved abruptly to his computer and opened the search engine. Vertesi asked, “What’s up?”
“An idea—maybe nothing. I just thought Aziz—a PhD, a detective, a member of a visible minority, a Muslim—remember the article the Standard did when she was promoted to DI? It’s a long shot, but Ghosh and Nam are both overachievers.” He tapped in Taaraa Ghosh. The first page to appear was filled with news reports of her murder, but halfway down the second page was an article published three months earlier: “New Canadian Places First among Nursing Students.” It included a photograph of her smiling as she checked the blood pressure of an elderly patient, who was also smiling. The article mentioned, among other things, the death of Taaraa’s father and brother in a terrorist bombing in Bangladesh.
Williams then entered Lea Nam’s name and hit the Return button. Again after the coverage of the recent attack came older articles, some of them from national sources, about her triumphs—or predicted triumphs—in cross-country.
MacNeice sat down at his desk, staring over at Williams’s screen.
“So you figure our perp is reading the papers to identify his targets?” Vertesi said.
“Why not? Narrows the field. They’re in the news because they’re great at something, and he’s got pictures for reference. So far he’s hit two of them …”
“It’s also something you could reverse-engineer,” MacNeice said.
“How so?” Vertesi asked.
“You enter ‘outstanding young immigrant women’ plus ‘Dundurn.’ Find the articles and you find the potential targets,” Williams answered. “Based on the first two, he’s not going to take out an immigrant mom who’s in the news because her welfare cheque didn’t arrive and her kid has leukemia.” He looked over at Ryan. “Does that make sense?”
“The question needs refining,” Ryan said.
“You know how to do it, though?”
“Yessir. Soon as I’m done with the hospital, if that’s okay.”
“Keep going on the hospital footage,” MacNeice said.
He got up and went to Swetsky’s office, where he wouldn’t be disturbed. He wasn’t sure Aziz would say yes to his offer. He was pretty sure she had burned out not because of their last case but because of their mutual attraction—or distraction. That distraction had led to the death of a young man, a witness to a murder whom the perpetrators wanted to silence. They’d thrown him over the railing of a hotel atrium, twenty-one storeys above the lobby; he’d smashed through a glass ceiling and blown apart at her feet. Her belief in MacNeice had been extinguished at the same time, he feared.
He laid his hand on the desk phone, working up his nerve, then picked up the receiver and dialled. The telephone rang several times before she answered. MacNeice felt a rush hearing her voice again—so steady and assured. He said hello and, after an awkward silence, asked, “Is teaching all you hoped it would be, Fiza?”
There was a long pause, during which he heard her sigh, then, at last, chuckle. “No. No, it isn’t, Mac. I don’t know—teaching isn’t living, it’s like constantly preparing for life.”
“I’m not sure I understand …”
“I’m not sure I do either. The faculty are all criminologists, no doubt about that, and in the main they’re fine people, even dedicated people, but none of them has ever smelled fear or death or experienced the brutal mayhem that we—They’re concerned about tenure, Mac, and putting decks on their cottages in the Gatineaus.”
“But I would have thought that brutal mayhem was exactly what you didn’t want after our last outing.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
The phone line went quiet again, and MacNeice simply waited for her to continue. He studied a snapshot tacked on the wall above the phone: a smiling Swetsky on a dock somewhere triumphantly lifting a large muskellunge for the camera. On the border he had written: The one that didn’t get away. Was it a talisman that helped Swetsky deal with the grim realities of homicide? MacNeice realized he’d never seen the big man smile like that.
“Mac …”
“Yes?”
“Why are you calling?”
> “To ask you to come back. Your job is open if you’re interested—and we really need you here.”
Aziz inhaled sharply; he could hear her chair creak as she changed positions. “You’re serious?” Then she said, “Of course, you’re serious.”
“You must have heard about the biker killings, which have already stretched our resources to the maximum. Someone is also slashing and killing young women here, Fiza. I’m very serious.”
“How much time do I have to think it over?”
“Fiza, we don’t have time.”
“But really, how soon would I have to get back to you? I don’t want to leave them in the lurch here, no matter how much I don’t think I’m suited to teaching.”
“By now I mean today. Now.”
“Okay—tonight.”
22.
THEY WERE ALL staring at him as he returned to the cubicle. He shrugged, then said, “We’ll hear by tonight if she’s coming back.” All of them knew better than to push him for more detail, though Vertesi said, “Maybe we should book her a hotel until she can get her stuff moved back.” MacNeice had to laugh, and they all joined in. Clearly they missed her almost as much as he did. “Let’s just hold off on that,” he said. “I don’t want to jinx it.”
Williams said, “Ryan’s ready to roll four weeks of Ghosh Emerg footage.”
They had set up a ringside seat for MacNeice right in front of Ryan’s central monitor. Ryan was off to the side of the desk, his keyboard and joystick in front of him.
Reviewing the footage was disorienting, like watching the grooves on a baggage carousel pass by after a long flight. The scenes began at normal speed, then Ryan would move the stick forward and they’d speed up, or he’d move it back and Taaraa would walk by in slow motion. The detectives focused on the images as Ryan manipulated the joystick. They watched the changing cast of characters pass—fast, slow, normal—and after a while they sank into the rythmn of it so much that normal speed resembled crawling.
Every one of Ghosh’s interactions appeared to be pleasant, professional and compassionate, whether she had her arm around an old man with a walker or was easing an extremely pregnant woman into a wheelchair or was kneeling in front of a boy with a gash on his knee.
On the third pass MacNeice said, “Wait. Rewind it. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
Ryan, who’d been slouching, sat up in anticipation and shoved the stick down, the images blurring by.
“Stop.” MacNeice moved closer to the screen. Williams looked at Vertesi, who raised his eyebrows.
“What’ya got, boss?” Williams said.
“I’m not sure. Ryan, can you isolate this frame, then roll it all again slowly?”
“No problem.” He clicked the keyboard several times and moved the mouse about. Soon the solitary image occupied a corner of the middle screen while the video footage continued to roll on the smaller monitor.
“Stop. Grab that image.” MacNeice pointed to the frame.
Click, click, click and the second image appeared beside the first. “Let it roll, sir?”
MacNeice nodded.
Soon a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth image had joined the first two in a grid on the Falcon’s large monitor.
“Before you do anything else, can you label each of those images with the date and time they were captured?”
“Give me five minutes, sir,” Ryan said, sliding the keyboard in front of him.
MacNeice left the cubicle to make an espresso. When he was gone, Vertesi and Williams moved closer to the screen, scanning the images.
“I think it’s the guy in the light jacket.” Ryan pointed to the left side of the screen. The same tall young man was either standing off to the edge of the frame or, in others, half out of the picture.
Williams shook his head slowly in admiration. “Man, the boss has an eye. All this time I was watching the people interacting with Ghosh.”
Returning with coffee in hand, MacNeice asked, “What have we got?”
“The guy in a tan or grey jacket, off to the left,” Williams said. “Exactly. Who is he? Why is he there?”
“How the hell did you spot him?” Vertesi asked. “He’s so far out of the action—barely in the shot.”
“That’s the point. He’s barely there, but he’s always there. Some people stand out because they keep interacting, like the staff. Others stand out because they’re not, like him. He’s standing or sitting among people, but apart from them. Never engaging or being engaged … He’s just watching.” MacNeice studied the eight images.
“I ran the pattern-recognition program and there’s more shots of him coming in now, sir.” Ryan said, clicking the keyboard. In a moment, six additional images appeared above the original eight.
“Just legs and a bit of the jacket …” Williams said.
“Looks like he spotted the camera,” Ryan offered.
“I’m sure he did. Put the dates on those images as well.” MacNeice finished his coffee and sat down.
“Should we review the fractures clinic footage again, see if he’s up there?” Vertesi asked.
“He won’t be if he’s our man. That clinic is too deep within the hospital. He wants a nearby door to the outside and an easy escape route. We’ve been focused on the staff as suspects, which was the right thing to do—until he hit Lea Nam. I doubt she’d ever seen the inside of this hospital.”
“Ready to roll, sir.” Ryan smiled, cracking his knuckles theatrically. The eight images blinked off the screen, then back on, with date and time in a black bar at the bottom. The screen seemed to hesitate for a moment; then another six images joined the grid.
“Jesus, look at the dates!” Vertesi said. “He was there on five separate days. Who needs to be in an emergency ward for five days? And three of them consecutive.”
“Can you refine the best of these images—what’s the word for that?” MacNeice asked.
“Sharpen,” Ryan said. “I can confuse the resolution into thinking it’s sharper. And I can adjust the exposure so even a distant relative would recognize him. Give me five more minutes.”
“Sir, I’ve got him,” Ryan said a short while later, sliding his chair to the right.
Judging by the door frame behind him, the young man was just over six feet tall and slim, maybe 180 pounds. He had a long neck that supported a disproportionately large head. His face seemed too beautiful—boyish, almost pretty—to belong to someone so dangerous. How old is he? MacNeice wondered; it was difficult to imagine that he shaved, or had ever had a pimple. His eyes were large and wide apart; his hair was tousled and probably mousy blond, though it was difficult to be certain, since the images were in shades of grey. Was he intelligent? MacNeice studied the face again and concluded that if a cat hunting a sparrow is intelligent, then this was a very smart cat. In all but one image he was smiling. His expression reminded MacNeice of Chas Green’s dummy—and it was just as frozen. In one frame, however, he seemed to be distracted, watching someone at the nurse’s station, which was just out of view. When they’d looked at all the images, Ryan started again from the beginning.
“Look—his left hand in the first frame.” Vertesi pointed at the screen. There was a narrow bandage wrapped tightly around the palm.
“Yeah, but it’s not in the other frames,” Williams said. “Can you put them all up together again?”
“Zoom in on that hand.” MacNeice had turned away and was focused on the photo taped to the whiteboard of Taarraa Ghosh’s stomach, with his own hand-drawn swastika connecting the wounds.
“First day, bandage. Then no bandage. He had to be scouting. What other reason could there be?” Vertesi said, turning to MacNeice. “If the security cameras were picking him up—even when he moved to get out of the frame—why wasn’t Security picking him up?”
“They’re looking for action. Someone punches someone, throws a chair or shoves a nurse. This guy was just Smilin’ Sam, not askin’ for attention and not gettin’ any,” Williams said. “
I’ll get the close-up with its date and time down to the hospital Emerg—see if they’ve got a record of him.”
“Boss, can we send this image out across the province?” Vertesi asked.
“Not yet. Right now we have a smiling man in a waiting room. We don’t know who he is or why he keeps coming back. We need the hospital report, and we need the motorcycle. Ryan, can we check out the parking lot footage?”
Ryan moved back to the centre screen. Within minutes he’d matched the dates on the frames to the corresponding times in the parking lot, and soon he was pointing to the area in the lot where motorcycles were parked.
“Okay, we’re looking for a two-stroke, whatever that is,” Williams said.
“Yeah, with a red or orange tank—easy to pick out in a black-and-white video,” Vertesi added sarcastically.
“On the right there”—Ryan pointed—“by the edge of the lot. That’s a 1986 Yamaha RZ500LC, in orange and white, or red and white. That’s a hopped-up two-stroke—V4, six-speed, with 8,500 rpms of torque.”
“Are you serious?” Williams looked down the line of motorcycles.
“I race dirt bikes. It’s the only two-stroke in the bike pen.”
“What the hell does ‘8,500 rpms of torque’ mean?” Williams glanced over at Vertesi.
“Means it’s a road bitch, sir,” Ryan answered. “Built for speed, not for buying sody pops down at the mall. Its final production year was 1986. You couldn’t even buy that bike in the States—it was too hot for their environmental standards even then, which is probably why Yamaha pulled it.”
“Can you read the plate?” MacNeice asked.
“No, sir, he parked it broadside to the camera. But I’ll scan the footage for these dates and grab him on the move.”
“Who would service a bike like that, Ryan?” MacNeice asked, leaning into the screen.
“Well, the guy who owns this can probably take it apart like a junior Lego set. If it were mine, I wouldn’t let anyone touch it. There are bike geeks I can ask, though …”
The Ambitious City Page 13
