Below the first heading, he identified the images of the Hamilton and Scourge, the names of the couple from the Packard and the bodies in the two older concrete columns, and two photos of Bermuda Shorts—the close-up that Ryan had Photoshopped to remove the hole in his forehead, and a full-length shot that MacNeice had taken on site, also retouched. He pointed to Bermuda Shorts.
“This man has a .44-calibre entry wound in his forehead. We’ve doctored the images for this presentation so you can see what he looked like without it.”
Under Bermuda Shorts were listed the three winning concrete supply companies and the loser, DeLillo Concrete, of Buffalo–Fort Erie. Following that was the Old Soldiers roadhouse in Tonawanda.
In the other column he wrote:
Why did Sergeant Hughes leave the military?
What plans did he have for his future?
Who were his friends at the Old Soldiers roadhouse?
What work was he seeking?
What work was he qualified for?
Did he have relatives or friends in Canada?
Was he a gambler? Alcohol or drug dependent?
MacNeice slid the marker into the tray and turned back to the room. “These questions aren’t intended to cause more grief for either of you, and we have to ask them. Everything in the other column is what we have so far. Before we begin, you’re welcome to ask anything at all about what you see here.” He sat down, poured a glass of water and waited.
Penniman was staring at the photo of Bermuda Shorts. “That man wouldn’t be a friend of Gary’s under any circumstances.” And that was all either of them could add or wanted to know about the first column.
They did a little better with the list of questions, though Sue-Ellen was barely holding it together. She said that her husband had begun to question America’s role in Iraq, but it was when he was deployed to Afghanistan that he grew angry at both the role and the strategy. “I think Gary just burned out. There was a Catch-22 in place so that people kept getting rotated back: he kept seeing his troops get injured or killed, and it seemed there would be no end to it.”
She blew her nose and wiped her eyes before continuing. “As for his future, it was vague. He decided to get out of the army and then think about what to do. Once he was out, he met up with some vets at Old Soldiers—I’m not sure he knew any of them before. I’ve never been there and I’ve never met any of them. After he disappeared, the investigators said no one at the roadhouse recognized him.”
“I heard it was a biker hangout and that a lot of them were vets, but that’s all I know,” Penniman said.
“Gary wasn’t a biker!” Sue-Ellen insisted. “He was there drinking beer. I worried that he had PTSD, and told him so, but he laughed it off. He was great with the kids, with me, but his benefits package wasn’t enough to keep us going … so we argued about that … quite a bit.” Her eyes filled and she stopped talking.
“You mentioned a security job? That he was going to meet someone about it?”
“Yeah. I mean, he was a martial arts specialist and a combat soldier, so in a way it made sense to me. But he didn’t tell me anything more than that.”
“Was he meeting this person at the roadhouse?”
“I think so, but it was like he was keeping something from me …”
“Did he know anyone or have relatives in Canada?”
“No, Gary didn’t have any family. His parents have been gone for years and he was an only child. We were his family—me and the kids, and Mark and his wife, Tracy.”
“And the army,” Mark Penniman added.
MacNeice looked at the next question on the list and then finally just asked, “Did he have an abuse problem—drugs, alcohol, gambling?”
She flinched but answered. “Not drugs or gambling—never. Of course he’d been drinking more since he got out—maybe too much—but he was never falling-down drunk or anything. He was a good man.”
MacNeice said, “Mrs. Hughes, I think you’ve been through more than enough for one day. Would you mind if we had a brief word with your brother? I’d like to get his insights into what your husband might have been up to—if Sergeant Penniman agrees, of course.”
Penniman nodded.
“All right, Michael will stay here with you, along with DI Aziz. Mark, would you please come with us?”
Aziz got up and went to sit beside Sue-Ellen as MacNeice and Williams led Penniman to Interview Room Two. The sergeant sat down facing the mirror.
“There’s no one behind the glass this time,” MacNeice said.
“I trust you, sir.” He smiled, genuinely, MacNeice thought.
“Are you a martial arts specialist as well?”
“No, sir. I’m also special ops, like Gary was, but a different discipline.”
“What discipline, if you don’t mind my asking?” MacNeice had his pen in hand but decided not to use it; he laid it on the closed notebook.
“I’m a sniper.”
“Do you work in a team?” MacNeice asked, trying to mask his surprise at how direct the statement was, as if he had been asked his astrological sign and responded, I’m a Virgo.
“I’m responsible for four teams—shooter/spotter teams.”
“Would you cover Gary’s platoons or were you out on your own?”
“Both. He was always getting up close, always the first to come to town. The local Ghannies around Helmand knew Gary, and I think they respected him. FOBs are hairy places—it’s asymmetric warfare—and he was comfortable with that. I’m usually a thousand yards or more off the beaten path. In Iraq it was door-to-door, because the firefights there were mostly urban, so I was competing with Iraqi snipers for the rooftops.”
“Just out of interest, when you’re over a thousand yards away, what weapon are you using, and what are the targets?” Williams asked.
“M24—7.62-millimeter rifle. My spotter and I hunker down and look for opportunities. The best is another sniper, second best a Taliban leader, third, someone planting an IED. It was the IEDs that got to Gary. He was all army. We sure never talked about whether he liked the direction the Pentagon was taking. He just hated seeing his people blown away.”
“Did he ask for leave?” Williams asked.
“You don’t ask for leave—ever. I only got to come home for the funeral because my commanding officer took the call and told me to go. Gary’d just had enough, and leave wouldn’t fix it, even if he’d asked.”
“Do you think he was desperate enough to earn a living that he’d use his training for criminal ends? Could his attitude have changed that much?”
“Not a chance. Sir, if the recession hadn’t hit, today Gary would probably be a carpenter building homes. He liked the work and he was good with his hands.”
“Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your brother-in-law, anything that might help us?” MacNeice asked.
Penniman stared at him, then said, “I followed Gary from the Sunni Triangle to the Fallujah arms markets and into Afghanistan, where enemies and friends change loyalties every day. I’ve seen first-hand what he can do. All I can say is, whoever did that to him probably had to clean up a stack of bodies afterwards. He wouldn’t go easy—you follow me?”
“I do.”
Penniman stood up to indicate the interview was over. “You got what you needed?”
“Yes, I think we have,” MacNeice said. He offered his hand. Once again, the Vise-Grip was on full crush.
28.
“DO YOU THINK Hughes was a one-man wrecking crew?”
Vertesi asked.
“Four large men die. Two have their big, thick necks snapped, one gets his faced caved in by a size twelve, and the last has his throat slashed through to the spine—sounds like Special Forces killing to me,” Aziz said.
“Yeah, it was the killing Olympics,” Vertesi said. “But one guy who weighed—what, 180 pounds—against four guys who weighed 250 or so?”
“One guy puttin’ an expensive education to use.” Williams shr
ugged as if it was obvious.
MacNeice studied the whiteboard, placing what he knew and what he didn’t in thought boxes. He said, “We’ve got bodies, competing concrete interests and—potentially—hired biker gangs for security. To secure what? We’ve got Hughes, who wasn’t a biker. We need to tie the buried bikers to Hughes and to figure out if the bodies above ground were payback for killing him and Bermuda Shorts.
And if they were vets, why did they break their code of taking every comrade—or his body—home? Though if, as Penniman said, Hughes was always the first to come to town, perhaps he was too far ahead to support.” He turned to his team. “Well, we can’t ask Old Soldiers.”
“Maybe we ask one of the local bikers—I mean, in a convincing way,” Williams suggested. “That sounds like a perfect job for Swets. He knows these guys—at least, the ones still standing—though he’d have to find ’em first.”
The desk phone rang. Ryan picked it up, listened and turned to MacNeice. “Sir, I’ve got Sheilagh Thomas from the university. She said you’ll want to take this call.”
Her voice in his ear was cheerful. “Mac, come out here this afternoon and I’ll treat you to the best plonk B.U. can afford.”
“It’s a lovely idea—”
“Please, no buts, Mac. This is important and it won’t take too much of your time. I’ll open the bottle now and let it breathe—or gasp. See you soon.”
Before he left the cubicle, MacNeice turned to Aziz and told her to start preparing for her first press conference.
“Detective Superintendent MacNeice?” A dark-haired young woman wearing a black T-shirt, knee-length khaki shorts and sandals greeted him inside the door.
“Yes.”
“I’m Andrea Gomes, one of Dr. Thomas’s grad students.”
“Pleased to meet you, Andrea.”
“I came to get you ’cause it’s kind of a maze getting down to our lab.”
He followed her up a flight of eight stairs, across a hallway buzzing with students and down another stairway to a corridor. At the end of the corridor they went through an exit door and down another set of stairs.
“I can see why you came for me,” he said as they walked along a glazed-brick corridor.
“Yeah, it took me a few days before I could find my way. Now, though, I could probably do it blindfolded.”
“I hope you’ll never have to.”
“Very funny, sir. Here we are.”
They stopped in front of a lab door with a long, slim window in it.
“Dr. Thomas is in her office, just to the left of the door. I’m going to get some munchies.” She smiled and walked back the way they had come.
Before opening the door, MacNeice peeked through the window to get a sense of the space. On the far wall there were large jars with specimens—of what he couldn’t tell—on oak shelves that rose from the floor to the ceiling. There were no windows but an overabundance of fluorescent light. In the middle of the room were several pieces of equipment that looked high-tech, most of it covered in clear plastic, and six computer stations that made him think Ryan would be very comfortable there. A cluster of students was busy at one station, and none appeared to notice him peering in. He could see at least three bouquets of flowers; they didn’t look store-bought but more as though they’d been cut from someone’s garden and dropped into various pieces of medical glassware.
He opened the door and stepped inside. Baroque music rose above the hum of equipment and air conditioning. He thought it was Handel but wasn’t sure.
Sheilagh Thomas was standing in her office with her back to the door, studying something in a large volume. Rising above the credenza in front of her was a bookcase that went up to the ceiling, and all of the books appeared to be immense. He looked back at the length of the lab. It ran for eighty feet or more and seemed to be broken into sections, or perhaps disciplines. At the far end was a row of much larger equipment and in between were six stainless steel specimen tables, four of them occupied.
“Impressive, isn’t it,” Thomas said, coming out to meet him.
“I have no idea what I’m looking at, but yes, it is. The only things I recognize are the flowers and possibly the music—Handel?”
“Close. Henry Purcell. The flowers come from a farm near my house; most of them grow wild. In the absence of daylight and fresh air, it’s the best I can do for my students. Would you like a tour?”
“I would very much, but not now. I have to get back downtown.”
“We’re building a stack of rain checks greater than the annual rainfall in Dundurn, but I understand. Come in and we’ll get straight to it—but over a glass of wine, I insist. And sometime soon you’ll take me to dinner and I’ll show you that I have more in my wardrobe—well, admittedly not much more—than lumberjack shirts.”
He smiled, noticing that her linen summer shirt was indeed a red, grey and black plaid.
The clutter of her Land Rover was nothing compared to her desk. It was piled high with more huge leather-covered books, bound documents, large manila sleeves with X-rays in them and at least ten Styrofoam cups with unintelligible markings on them—mostly numbers and letters. At the far end of the credenza behind it were two wineglasses and a bottle of red wine sitting on a circular tray. Beyond it was a ceramic setter, its head held proud and high with a limp mallard between its jaws, marching out of some marsh cattails.
“Let me clear a space …” She picked up a stack of books and put them on the floor behind her desk. A green blotter covered her desk, and on it, nearest the telephone, were doodles—all of bones. She moved the Styrofoam cups to the opposite end of the credenza, next to the skull of a small animal. On the bare brick walls were anatomical drawings that looked centuries old and a framed photograph—he guessed from the 1920s—of an elegant young woman standing next to a large stone fireplace, holding a pipe to her lips as she lit it with a stick from the fire.
“My grandmother. Something of a rebel.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Quite.” She went on to say that the family had money, position and power, but her grandmother left it all shortly after that photograph was taken and moved to Kenya to be a nurse. She stayed there till the Second World War and returned just in time to treat the wounded returning from Dieppe. Many were Canadians, of course.”
“Was she the one who inspired you?”
“Very much so, yes. Even when she was in her eighties, I would go over and sit by that fireplace as she told me stories and smoked her pipe.”
“Did she ever marry?”
“No. She’d had an affair with someone during the war who was killed in France. She died without revealing who he was. My mother was the product of that affair.”
“Tragic, and probably not uncommon,” MacNeice said, and she nodded.
The lab door opened behind him and Andrea appeared with a large plastic bowl filled with what looked like potato chips. She placed it on the desk. “They’re organic sweet potato as well as parsnip chips sprinkled with sea salt—we’re crazy about them. Hope you like them, Detective.” She looked over at Dr. Thomas and asked, “Need anything else?”
“No, thank you, Andrea, that’s lovely. We’ll be out shortly.”
Handing MacNeice the wine, she said, “A surprisingly lovely Pinot Noir from Niagara. Chin-chin. Sit down for a moment, Mac.”
He did, but even as he toasted her and sipped his wine, he was worrying that he needed to be gone, and he knew that she could see his mind was elsewhere. She set her own glass down.
“Well, let’s get down to it. Harry and Arthur. The scrapings we took from the concrete and the bones suggest they were dumped together, in 1928 or ’29. We started modelling the faces on the computer and noticed straightaway that the modelling wireframes were interesting.”
“In what respect?”
“The cheekbones. It seemed like a wild guess, but we said aboriginal.”
“Local?”
“We think so. One of my post-docs noticed a
similarity in the cheekbones and jaw to the painting of Joseph Brant—a Mohawk—that hangs in the common room. Then we had a breakthrough; hence my call and this rather decent Pinot. I can tell you for a certainty that they both died in 1929 and both had served in World War One.”
“How did you determine that?”
“We did a chemical scan of their leg, arm and rib bones, and in one of the column fragments there was a shred of flesh stuck to the concrete where a hand had been. In each scan we found a trace chemical that we’ve now identified as mustard gas. These men were both in the trenches.”
“That means we may be able to track them through Veterans Affairs.”
“You could, but you won’t have to. We know who they are.” She popped a chip into her mouth, crunched, then smiled triumphantly. “Andrea went through all the missing-person mentions in the Standard for 1928 and ’29. On March 31, 1929, there was a small article mentioning two Indian high-riggers who had failed to show up at work for a week and whose belongings were still in the Barton Hotel room they had rented by the month. What made it newsworthy wasn’t that they’d gone missing—that wasn’t uncommon at the time—it was that both had been decorated for valour during the second Battle of Ypres.”
“Ypres Salient … where the Germans first used mustard gas.”
“Very good, MacNeice. These two were cousins on their mother’s side, Charlie Maracle and George Marshall. They were both awarded medals of valour—Charlie a Military Cross, and George the Military Medal and bar. We haven’t researched for descendants yet … Care for a bit more wine?”
“No thanks, but I definitely wouldn’t call it plonk.”
“Come along, then, the stars of our molecular anthropology lab, led by Andrea and a couple of the undergrads, are going to present what they discovered when they extracted genetic material from the bones of Charlie and George.”
Halfway down the lab a laptop was connected to a projector that lit the white concrete blocks of the exterior wall. The students had gathered around, waiting for the two of them to appear. Further on, the skeletal remains of Charlie and George were also waiting, on the stainless steel tables. On cue, someone killed the fluorescents.
The Ambitious City Page 17
