MacNeice descended the stairs and followed the sound of Williams humming “Amazing Grace.”
“Welcome to the kid’s room,” Williams said when MacNeice appeared. He was holding up a samurai sword. Pointing with it, Williams said, “On that shelf you’ve likely got damn near every samurai movie ever made, and over there—where the oil stain is on the exercise mat—are tools and bits for fixing his bike. The door down the hall leads to the garage. How’s it upstairs?”
“Like nobody lives here anymore.”
“Yeah, well, this was lived in …” Williams said, fanning through the books on the shelves below the videos.
MacNeice scanned the spines. Math, computer science, the science of demography, chess, chaos theory, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, Dungeons and Dragons and a substantial number of video games that appeared to mirror the books’ subject matter.
“It’s Fantasy Island for geeks—oh, except for the ever-popular Mein Kampf.” Williams handed him the book from the bottom shelf.
MacNeice flipped through the pages, checking the handwritten notes in the margins, the twisted wisdom underlined with shockingly straight lines. The spine of the book told the story—so well worn it was close to breaking. He put it back on the shelf and opened the closet door.
It was a drill sergeant’s dream. Six pant hangers, each with a neatly hung pair of chinos, size 32 long. Next to them, four madras shirts, long-sleeved, in shades of blue, and next to those, eight pale blue button-down cotton shirts. On the shelf above were T-shirts in white, black and dark blue, all neatly folded and stacked. On the floor were several pairs of brown and black penny loafers and two pairs of white Converse high-tops—but no hiking boots.
In the adjoining room there was a large tatami mat and a small shelf with candles, incense and a ceramic Buddha. On the wall was an illustration—front and back—of a nude Chinese male with the pressure points, veins and arteries drawn as if they were surface-mounted on the flesh. MacNeice wondered how Dance squared this side of his personality with Mein Kampf.
He backtracked to open the door to an empty garage. There were tire tracks in the dust and old oil stains from an automobile. The garbage bins were empty and tucked neatly along the far side; a robin’s egg–blue bicycle with big fenders and white-walled balloon tires leaned against one wall. Both tires were flat. Williams came up beside him and peered into the garage.
“Where’s the mother’s car?” MacNeice said.
“She had one?”
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere. She’d have to drive to buy groceries or gin.”
“I’ll get onto Motor Vehicles.”
At 8:17 p.m. the forensics team arrived. MacNeice and Williams stepped into the cool of the evening to find Aziz and Vertesi waiting on the stone path. Aziz held up a small plastic bag. “I picked up some of the mail, but Michael says there’s another stack of it in the dining room.”
“Forensics will bring it in for us,” MacNeice said. Someone cleared his throat off to the left, presumably to get their attention.
“Michael, that’s likely the next-door neighbour, wondering what’s going on over here. Get a statement from him. I’d like to know what kind of relationship William had with his parents and to see if the neighbour has any idea where we’d find him, or whether he knows someone who might.”
Vertesi walked between the trees and vaulted easily over the fieldstone wall. MacNeice carried his briefcase to the Chevy, locked it in the trunk and then stood staring into the woods again. Nothing.
Aziz and Williams soon joined him. “See anything, boss?” Williams asked.
“Just wondering if he was watching us.”
“I thought you were looking for birds,” Aziz said, looking up at him.
MacNeice smiled.
“You think he’d have the balls to do that?” Williams asked.
“I’m certain he would. I’d go so far as to say I thought I could feel him watching us earlier.”
“Well, in that case, let me check it out.” Williams made sure his sidearm was free and took out his Maglite. Stepping over a fallen branch, he sang softly, “If you go down to the woods tonight, you’re in for a big-motherfuckin’ surprise …”
“Straight ahead fifty yards or so, to where the ground falls off into the ravine,” MacNeice directed.
They watched Williams pick his way through underbrush and fallen branches, sweeping his Maglite back and forth. MacNeice wasn’t worried about his being attacked by Dance—even if he was the right colour, he was the wrong gender.
Watching the bright cone of light recede in the distance, Aziz asked, “What did you see in that house?”
“Feel, not see. I can’t define it … a vibe. Strange.” It wasn’t haunted, but the whole house had a sad quality, an absence of love. He had felt it outside, sitting in the garden, and everywhere inside. He could hear Vertesi making his way towards them over the unraked leaves of the mini forest.
“Where’s Montile headed?” Vertesi asked, as he hopped the wall again to rejoin them.
“Just checking. What’d the neighbour say?”
“He was curious, all right. Hadn’t seen the news, but unlike Braithwaite, he always thought the kid was weird. His name is Howard Matheson, a wealth manager. He has no idea where Dance has gone.”
Matheson had described the parents as pleasant but not social; they’d moved in about twelve years before, after Dance retired as CEO of Sterling. He had stayed on as chair of the board, but other than coming in for board meetings, he and his wife spent most of the year up north, leaving the house to their only child.
“At least the guy was honest,” Vertesi said. “He told me he learned much of what he knew about them from their obits.”
“Dance Senior was—what, an actuary?” MacNeice said, watching as Williams made his way back through the forest towards them.
“How’d you guess?” Vertesi said.
“Dance Junior—extraordinary skills in mathematics and data. Just a guess.”
When Williams emerged from the forest, he switched off the flashlight. “Someone has been there,” he called. “The ground five feet or so below the ridge is torn up. I can’t say whether it was an hour or a day ago, but recently.”
34.
PENNIMAN BACKED HIS twenty-year-old grey Suburban behind the 24/7 pizza stand on the corner and waited. Ten minutes after he had left the bar, two heavies came out of Old Soldiers and climbed on their Harleys. They turned south up the service road, riding slowly side by side. Penniman waited till they were almost out of sight, then followed them. A half-mile later he could see Wenzel walking along the gravel shoulder on the opposite side. Penniman eased onto the shoulder without hitting the brakes and rolled to a stop. He reached into the glove compartment, retrieved an M9 Beretta and snapped in the clip.
Up ahead, the bikers had pulled a U-turn and stopped so that they hemmed Wenzel in. Unsure what to do, the kid backed down into the ditch as if he was going to make a run for the bush. Then, maybe realizing how futile that was, he stopped. Caught between them, he stumbled back onto the shoulder, his hands raised. As the bikers climbed off their machines and came towards him, Penniman put the truck in gear and moved off the shoulder. When he was within fifty yards, he crossed the road, driving towards them on the gravel shoulder. He stopped as one of the bikers grabbed Wenzel and held him so the other could punch him hard in the face. Wenzel’s nose exploded and blood ran down the kid’s chin. The biker was about to hit him again when Penniman hit the horn. The biker spat in the dirt towards him and threw another punch, to Wenzel’s stomach. Penniman stepped on the gas and rammed the bike then drove over it, grinding the machine under his front wheels. Inside the Suburban it sounded like a beer can being crushed by hand.
The biker holding Wenzel screamed, dropped the kid and rushed towards Penniman, swearing and waving his arms as if he needed oxygen. The second biker headed for his saddlebag, presumably for a weapon.
Stepping out of the Suburban, Pennima
n pointed his sidearm at the nearest of the bikers and fired a round into the gravel between his legs. Both men stopped dead. Wenzel stumbled to his feet, squatted and puked into the dirt. Groaning, he sat down on the ground, spitting a mixture of blood and vomit.
The one whose bike lay crushed and leaking fuel into the ditch screamed, “You are a fucking dead man! You are so fucking dead!” Up close Penniman could see that both of these men had been sitting with the bartender at the end of the bar.
“Get up, Wenzel. Into the truck—now,” Penniman ordered. Wenzel staggered towards the passenger side, climbed in and slammed the door behind him.
“You fucking shit, you’ll pay for this,” the second biker threatened, his eyes on Penniman’s gun.
“Get whatever you were going for out of the saddlebag, now. Move.”
The biker hesitated.
“The next round will be into your gas tank, so either go get it now or stand clear.”
“I’ll get it. Fuck, I’ll get it!” He unbuckled the strap and removed a .44 Magnum. For a fraction of a second he was clearly considering taking the chance; then he dropped the gun on the ground.
“Not on the ground, grunt. That is a precision instrument. You’ll hand that to me, and I think you know how.”
The biker picked it up by the barrel and walked slowly to within arm’s reach, then passed it to Penniman butt first. “You boys were having fun back at the bar, I think at my expense.”
“We spotted you as a faggot—a fucking army faggot.”
“So let me get this straight. Here are the two of you—dressed in black leather with little fringes on your pants and your motorcycles all dolled up with bags, more fringes and shit—and you think I look like a faggot? You truly are sorry fucks. I’m going to head back home now. I’ll drop off Wenzel somewhere safe. Do I have your approval to do that?”
“Fuck you.”
“Last thing—get out your cellphones.”
Both bikers hesitated.
“Do it now.” Penniman pointed the weapon at the motorcycle’s gas tank.
“Okay, okay—fuck!” They took out their cellphones and held them out to him.
“I don’t want your phones, for Christ’s sake. Throw them into the bush.” He fired at the bike; the shot tore a hole in the black leather seat. Both men threw their phones as far as they could.
“I will personally skin you alive, you fuck,” the second biker said.
“Pathetic. Mount up, boys. Take the hog that’s still standing back to the pigpen.”
Slowly the men backed away from him, then climbed onto the bike. As they rode off, the one on the back yelled, “We’ll come back for you, fucker!”
Penniman climbed into his truck, backed it off the Harley and pulled away, heading towards the Peace Bridge, and Canada.
35.
“WHAT DO YOU think they’ll find?” Billie asked, closing the door behind him.
“Squat. My books—math mostly, some history, stuff on the Knights Templar. They’ll get my prints and probably my DNA, but that would only be a problem if I was trying to get away.”
“What do you think of the Muslim criminologist?”
“She took a chance walking along the forest there. Probably thinks that Glock on her hip will protect her.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?”
“If she had a chance to use it, but she won’t.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. The other guy is a bigwig cop—I’ve read about him. He holds the record for solving homicides, at least around here. It was cool how he kept scanning the forest—slowly, like a predator with a heat-seeking scope. We ducked below the edge just in time.”
“It was cool too, how he got inside.”
“Yeah, cops and crooks—they all use the same tools. But there was something else about him …”
“What?”
“When they were sitting on the rock, didn’t you notice?”
“Well, yeah, they were talkin’ and stuff.”
“But not the way a detective superintendent talks to a detective inspector. He’s her superior officer …”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“Don’t you think they were very familiar with each other?”
“You mean, like he’s fuckin’ her?”
“I don’t know, but something’s up with them that isn’t cop work.”
“So, do we hit her first or the Indian with the Mercedes?”
“You know, the one thing that makes demographers like Braithwaite grind their teeth at night …” he said, looking at the photo of Narinder Dass on the wall.
“Old beady-eye?”
“BDI, yes. They can’t stand chance—the roll of the dice, the flip of the coin. They hate chance, even if it’s a one percent risk.”
“Why?”
“Just because it’s chance! He measures trends from facts and predicts facts from trends. If you flip a coin—especially when you mix that in with measured choices like Ghosh and Aploon—it royally fucks up the stats. BDI hates that. My guess is Braithwaite tipped them off to go to the house.”
“So should we ride out and do him?”
“No, forget that. I’m into colour. Braithwaite’s lame, but his shit is probably as white as he is. I say we flip a coin—heads we do the Muslim, tails we do the Indian.”
“How fuckin’ cool is that! I love it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Glad you didn’t ride the Yamaha.”
“I’m many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”
“She’s good-looking too …”
“This one? Yeah, I guess so, but that doesn’t interest me.”
“I know, sure, but I’d rather be doing beautiful women than fat, ugly ones.”
“For the aesthetics, yes, I agree. But strictly for the aesthetics.”
36.
DRIVING BACK TO Division, Aziz sorted the mail she’d picked up from inside the door. It was a mixture of bills and letters from former employees and friends sent to William Junior, offering condolences. There were five from Wes Young Toyota. The leasing department was asking for back payment on the beige 2010 Toyota Camry registered to Dance’s mother. The first had arrived when the payments were in arrears by two months; from there they got increasingly threatening as the months went by with no response from Billie.
MacNeice looked at his watch as they entered the empty cubicle—9:23 p.m. “Do those letters include the ownership and licence plate numbers?”
“Yes, you want them?” She offered the letters.
“Hang on to them and we’ll use the info in tomorrow’s press conference. But get it into the system too, in the unlikely event that he’s driving around town.”
By the time MacNeice had tracked Maybank down, it was 10:12
p.m. Vertesi and Williams had come and gone, Williams agreeing to take Aziz to the hotel and pick her up in the morning. The mayor was on edge. The unions were upset because they’d heard rumours about links between the concrete suppliers and biker gangs, after Maybank had gone on record to say there was no connection between the bodies in the bay and the contractors on the project. The media had been sniffing around trying to make a story out of it, and if they did, the unions would shut down the project, and the deadlines he’d guaranteed to the city’s provincial and federal partners would be blown.
He didn’t mince words, loudly telling MacNeice that this was exactly the situation he had brought him in to avoid. When he finally ran out of steam, he asked why MacNeice was calling so late.
MacNeice explained that Aziz was leading the press conference the next day and that they had identified three more potential victims—there was no telling which, if any, of the women Dance would go after. But he would likely attack someone in the next day or so.
“You think he’s got a fucking list? Does she realize the danger?”
“Of course she does. For all these women, including Aziz, I need cover.” MacNeice waited for the mayor to respond but h
eard only heavy breathing. “Bob, I can’t promise this will flush him out, but I want him to either try for Aziz so we can stop him, or feel so pressured he gives himself up.”
“What’s the likelihood he’d do that?” Maybank sounded hopeful.
“Low to very low.”
“So you’re really just screwing with his head and using Aziz for bait.”
“Basically, yes.”
“You’re a colder fucker than I ever realized.”
“Perhaps. Okay the units, Bob, and if this works, I promise you I’ll stand beside you and face the music on everything. You can dump it all on me if you need to.”
“Oh, trust me, that’s a given! We go back a long way and I’ve never asked you for anything, ever—but I need this project to go ahead. You’ve got your units, but don’t let me down.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Better than best, Mac. Way better. For your colleague’s sake, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
The mayor’s comment stayed with him on the drive home, throughout dinner and even as he sat looking out to the garden with a grappa, watching the bats zip through the light from the window. MacNeice didn’t know what he was doing. He was, at best, improvising. At worst he was relying on someone who only days before had been a university lecturer, who claimed she hadn’t lost her touch with a Glock 17. Worst of all, he knew Aziz assumed she’d have time to use it. He wasn’t convinced.
He turned away from the bat races as Art Pepper’s heartbreaking solo in “Loverman” came on the stereo. That’s when he noticed the light bouncing off the wall in the hallway—a car was speeding up towards the cottage. He set the grappa glass on the windowsill and stood up. He heard the car stop and idle outside, its door opening and shoes moving quickly across the gravel. Something about the gait suggested Vertesi. He opened the front door just as the young detective was about to knock.
“It’s Mark Penniman, sir. We gotta go. I’ll tell you on the way.” Vertesi ran back to the car, turned it around and opened the passenger door, waiting for MacNeice.
The Ambitious City Page 21
