MacNeice nodded his thanks and walked over to the windows that overlooked the parking lot, to see if he could spot anything interesting in the trees. One minute before noon, the door opened and a shaken Aziz made her way to the stairs without even noticing MacNeice standing there. The uniform was called inside and came out a minute later to escort him in.
Before he followed he glanced back out to the treeline of the parking lot. Two crows were passing overhead; one dropped down to land on a young gingko tree, the branches swaying wildly under the bird’s weight. MacNeice smiled.
Tent cards provided the names of each board member: Dorothy Peterson, Elizabeth Wells-Carpenter, Alice Yeung, David Hruby and Robert Crawford. He guessed that all three women were in their early to mid-forties. They were dressed in grey or black business suits, with only Yeung showing any colour—a jade blouse. The two men wore dark blue suits and looked like insurance brokers. A court stenographer sat behind her computer at the end of the table near the windows. Her face was a study in benign neutrality. In front of each board member was a notepad, a pencil, and a bulldog-clipped report that he assumed contained the details of the Dance case; each also had a glass of water and a cup of tea or coffee. They appeared relaxed and self-confident, as if it would be evident to any observer that they were the right people to tackle the task at hand.
Robert Crawford smiled broadly and introduced himself as chair. The pleasantries continued for almost ten minutes and included acknowledgement of MacNeice’s service record and his many commendations. Crawford cited the documents of support provided by Chief Pathologist Mary Richardson and Deputy Chief Wallace, as well as the affidavit from the mayor. He spoke about the need to ensure that the facilities of all police divisions be assessed for their security and that deficiencies be corrected immediately where found wanting. He acknowledged MacNeice’s personal courage in entering the basement and confronting William Dance—and that’s where the flattery stalled.
The woman on the far left, Dorothy Peterson, spoke first. “DS MacNeice, why did you enter that basement alone?” She smiled, he thought, genuinely.
“I could have told Detective Inspector Williams to take the basement, but I didn’t. The fact was, we had no time to ponder what to do; we had to trust our intuition and act swiftly. Dance set it up that way.”
She was making notes without looking up. “Explain what you mean by ‘Dance set it up that way.’ ”
“He wanted to die after he’d killed his last victim. If DI Aziz hadn’t kicked out at him, that’s exactly how it would have ended.”
“You’re certain about that?” She put down her pencil and looked directly at him.
MacNeice glanced over at the transcriber, who was also looking at him and waiting. He didn’t answer.
“Detective?” Crawford prodded.
“Yes.”
David Hruby took it from there. “We’ve been told by the pathologist that your shot was fatal.”
“It was intended to be.”
“I’m sure it was. Why then, was it necessary to fire twice more?”
“Necessary?”
“Yes. If you had already killed Dance, why was he shot a second and third time?” Hruby’s tone was condescending.
“Once for Taaraa Ghosh and once for Samora Aploon.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Hruby’s face flushed.
“Let me answer the question I think you’re asking. No, this wasn’t an execution.”
“Was it not?” Dorothy Peterson asked.
“It was not an execution. My shot killed Dance as he lunged with his knife. If I hadn’t shot him, DI Aziz would be dead.”
“But you say that he set it up that way—effectively you executed him in the act,” Peterson said.
“I told him twice to drop the weapon and he didn’t. I shot him; I didn’t execute him.”
“So you believe there was no other way to stop him from killing DI Aziz?” Her pencil was poised again over the notepad.
“No.”
“And the second and third rounds?” She spoke each word slowly for greater emphasis. Hruby looked up from his notes.
“After I cut Aziz down from where she was hanging, I gave her her service weapon and encouraged her to fire, thinking it would give her back her dignity, and knowing that Dance was already dead.”
“Was her dignity such an issue?” the chair asked.
“Is it not for you, sir?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you had been stripped, hung up like a side of beef, sexually tormented and faced with the certainty that in a fraction of a second you’d be torn inside out, would survival not be your first concern?”
“Most certainly it would, yes.”
“Yes. So, having survived that threat, having been cut down—free, but naked—would dignity then not be an issue for you?”
Crawford didn’t answer but Alice Yeung took up the point. “Are you saying it was revenge, Detective?”
“No. Dance was already dead. This was an attempt to restore dignity. Aziz is a very fine officer; she had put her own safety at risk to capture him—”
Interrupting, Yeung asked, “Do you believe that what Aziz did—goading Mr. Dance into attacking her—was prudent? Was it a strategy that you, as her superior officer, endorsed?” She sat back and crossed her arms.
“I support Detective Aziz in all that she does. So yes, I endorsed it.”
“You didn’t feel it was cavalier … unnecessarily risky and provocative?” she asked.
“Aziz put herself in harm’s way in order to ensure that women throughout this city, perhaps a woman such as yourself, wouldn’t be harmed.”
Crawford took another tack. “Is Detective Aziz well?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Is she stable? I understand she’s back at work in your division.”
“I do not allow unstable personnel to serve under me, sir.”
“So she’s stable?”
“Detective Aziz is a professional. She is, no doubt, still processing what happened in that basement, but if any of you required a homicide detective, I’d have no hesitation in recommending Aziz—now or in the future.”
Elizabeth Wells-Carpenter turned over a page of notes and spoke for the first time. “Detective Aziz was until recently teaching criminology at a university. Can you tell us how and why she came back to work with Dundurn Homicide?”
“I believe the mayor addressed that in his recent press conference.”
“And you agree with his version of events?”
“Of course I do.”
The woman smiled at him and returned to her notes. Crawford looked at each of the members of the board in turn. Each nodded yes, whereupon he turned to MacNeice.
“Detective Superintendent MacNeice, speaking as the inquiry’s chair, it is not the mandate of this board to prosecute or pursue DI Aziz unfairly. The documents of support we’ve received from the Deputy Chief and the mayor echo your own respect for her, as do those from your colleagues DIs Williams and Vertesi. However, there is a fact that we must consider: William Dance was shot twice after your fatal round. Why that was done—whether for revenge or perhaps so that Dance would at last atone for the grotesque deaths of two young women, as you seem to suggest—that sir, is a question worthy of consideration.
“If Detective Aziz, or you, were—shall we say—unbalanced through the course of this action, then some might question your steadiness under fire in the future. If Detective Aziz taunted Dance into attacking her, that could be interpreted in several ways. Was she personally, rather than professionally, caught up in this young man’s twisted life? Was she crossing the line of responsible law enforcement, whatever her motives of justice were, by putting her life at risk—and your own, I might add—in a cavalier or unstable manner? As a visible minority herself, did she identify too closely with his victims?”
The chair’s hands were crossed gently over each other and he looked calmly at MacNeice—as if h
e were explaining the rules of lawn bowling—before he continued. “If, as you say, she was given her weapon by you to fire those two shots into Mr. Dance’s dead or dying body, then you are both responsible for something, and if it goes ahead, that may be the critical question this inquiry must resolve. I want to assure you, though, that this is not a witchhunt. This city is in your debt and in DI Aziz’s debt. But as you and she were the only two to walk out of that furnace room alive, we need to probe what happened—and why. Do I make myself clear, sir?”
“You do.”
“Very well. This is a preliminary hearing. What happens next will depend on the opinion of this board. It may end here or go further. Is there anything you’d like to add before you leave us, Detective MacNeice?”
MacNeice looked at each member of the inquiry panel. The smiling Wells-Carpenter was still smiling, Ms. Yeung still sat with her arms crossed and the others looked very relaxed about being on the other side of the table, with the exception of David Hruby, who still looked condescending.
“A while ago I was offered the position of deputy chief. I’d like to tell you why I turned it down.”
“Go ahead.” The older man sat back to listen.
“I am committed to serving this city and to training the finest homicide detectives in the country—in any country. They learn the skills of detection, of observation; they learn to trust their intuition—and each other, to interrogate and be thorough in every way. They gain a deep respect for the law; they work as a team, supported by each other’s strengths and helping each other overcome their weaknesses. But by far—by far—the most powerful thing they learn from me, I hope, is empathy—empathy for the victim, for the family, for the city and, yes, for the killer.
“What DI Aziz did in the press conference and TV interview will remain for me and this team the finest act of empathy I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t cavalier—it was courageous.” He picked up his notebook and slid his pen into his jacket pocket. “Aziz didn’t want Dance dead. She tried valiantly to bring him in unharmed—that’s in the public record. I simply wanted him stopped, because I didn’t think he would come in on his own.”
MacNeice stood up. “So there you have it. This could have played out in so many ways: more women dead and all of us still hunting because Aziz did not put her own life at risk, or Aziz dead alongside Dance. That’s what he wanted to happen—he wrote me a letter saying so.”
Without warning, MacNeice slapped his hand hard against the notebook. The noise startled everyone at the table, including the stenographer. “That’s how much time I had to think about it, gentlemen, ladies—that long. When I cut Aziz down, I gave her her gun and that small bit of dignity, that small gift.”
He nodded to each. The smiling woman wasn’t smiling anymore. He reached across the table, shook their hands, then left the room and the building.
Big fat, creamy clouds raced across the sky. Tinged with September colours, they looked muscular but somehow fragile, uncertain. Lacking self-determination, their form would be whatever the wind decided it would be. He stood on the stone walkway looking up till four gulls flew by, riding the breeze, gliding high above Dundurn towards the bay. The city was quiet as MacNeice walked across City Hall Plaza. He was heading nowhere in particular, and for no reason he knew of, he began humming “Over the Rainbow.”
EPILOGUE
THE RIBBON-CUTTING CEREMONY was set for 3:00 p.m. at the eastern wharf. Soldiers in period uniforms as well as members of the serving military of both countries lined the route from Burlington Street to the museum site. For MacNeice they presented a bizarre juxtaposition against the steel company’s rusting behemoths, a backdrop of forgotten sentinels from Dundurn’s industrial age.
Some distance to the east of the dock, public parking had been created. Once the dignitaries were comfortably seated at the bottom of the wharf, ordinary citizens from Dundurn and the Niagara region on both sides of the border were funnelled through metal detectors and invited to stand at the reinforced perimeter guardrail on the wharf above the site. When MacNeice stepped into one of the twelve industrial elevators that had been installed to aid construction—scheduled to begin a week later—it occurred to him that the public would have the best view.
Canadian and American security teams had been crawling over the site for more than a week. They were now satisfied that it was safe to proceed with the event, though they would reveal very little to Dundurn’s finest about what their contingency plans were if it went violently off script.
Politicians and VIPs from the United States, Britain and Canada were there, including the U.S. secretary of state, the British foreign secretary and Canada’s prime minister. Before the speeches began there was a ceremonial flypast featuring an American F-15 and its Canadian counterpart, an F-18. They approached from the north and south, and once overhead they went vertical, roaring upwards in a corkscrew dance towards heaven, until all that remained was the delayed thunder and receding scream of their engines, two micrometallic glints flickering in the sunlight.
What followed was even more impressive. The pennant-festooned American destroyer USS Arleigh Burke, which had been in Dundurn Harbour for a week of public tours, unleashed a bone-rattling twenty-one-gun salute over the city. Though the ship was anchored at least two hundred yards off the eastern dock, the barrage was so deafening that most people smiled wildly, like kids on their first roller coaster, and covered their ears. Because the ship was floating sixty feet or more above them, every blast caused the red-carpeted floor of the site to vibrate, sending an uneasy shiver up the legs of the six hundred people sitting there.
The stage was at the north end—bayside—festively draped with red and white bunting and bracketed by the flags of Canada, the United States, Britain, Ontario and the city of Dundurn. Among the seated dignitaries were the major donors and partners, senior bureaucrats from three levels of government, museum directors and historians, a multitude of media from both sides of the border, project architects and engineers and the major contractors. Alberto Mancini, Sean McNamara and Peter Glattfelder, the American head of ABC Canada–Grimbsby, and their wives were seated together.
Sue-Ellen Hughes and her children had also been invited. The mayor had insisted that she be acknowledged from the podium, and when the story of her husband made its way to the secretary of state, he insisted that an honour guard be drawn from Sergeant Hughes’s battalion to formally present her with the flag.
In the last row, MacNeice, Aziz, Vertesi, Williams and Swetsky sat next to the Deputy Chief. On the other side of the aisle were Dr. Sheilagh Thomas, her postdoctoral students and Ryan—who was locked in conversation with the young woman who’d met MacNeice outside the lab. He hoped they weren’t talking about computers.
Beyond them were members of the families of the Six Nations war heroes whose bodies had been found on this site. An elder dressed in beaded buckskin sat next to the prime minister on the stage, an eagle feather in his right hand. He would bless the project, on behalf of the First Nations of both countries, with a traditional smudging ceremony.
And so it began. A choir of two hundred schoolchildren—one hundred from each country—sang the national anthems of Britain, the United States and Canada. The elder rose and took the microphone. He spoke in Mohawk, and as he began the ceremony he walked slowly down the stairs and into the centre aisle, fanning the smoke with his eagle feather, spreading the pleasant smell of burning sweetgrass and sage. For several minutes it overcame an atmosphere that was vaguely marine and dank.
Then, as one would expect, the speeches began. Some were heavily scripted while others wandered on extemporaneously about history, peace and war. Mayor Robert Maybank spoke last, and his speech was by far the most compelling. He spoke about the history of Dundurn, about the glory days of steel, about the tragedies that had occurred off this very dock. But he was most splendid, most passionate, when it came to his vision for the Museum of the Great Lakes and the Hamilton and Scourge.
While no
t as deafening as the twenty-one-gun salute, when he was finished, people jumped to their feet to applaud him, while from above confetti and streamers showered down for several minutes, along with the cheers of more than three thousand spectators. Through the paper snow and swirling streamers, MacNeice could see Mayor Bob, his face shining, his eyes turned heavenward, arms outstretched—his greatest ambitions for Dundurn were finally coming resoundingly to life.
In the parking lot, MacNeice waved goodbye to Vertesi and Williams, then opened the passenger door for Aziz. She looked up at him and asked, “Where are we going?”
“For a drive. I’ll show you the falls.”
“I’ve seen Niagara a hundred times,” she said, climbing into the car.
“Not Niagara—Ball’s Falls. It’s quieter there, and prettier. We’ll get some peaches and sit in the park.” He closed the car door.
“Why’s it called Ball’s Falls?” she asked as he made his way onto the QEW, heading for the Secord cut-off.
“The Ball family started a mill there a long, long time ago.”
“Great name.”
“It is. And the last of the Balls, the one who left it to the region—his name was Manley Ball.”
“You’re making that up,” she said as she shifted in the seat to lean against the door, watching him.
“Fiza, honestly, to quote Montile, you can’t make shit like that up.”
He turned left on Highway 8, passing through Secord, passing the peach and pear and cherry orchards, passing the vineyards and the quiet towns that had once served hard-working farming families from Dundurn to Niagara, from the escarpment to the lake. He passed the awful sprawl of characterless condos and monster homes that every year erased more of that history, more of what mattered to him.
He stopped at a farm stall, parking in the shade of a century-old maple. “Wait here.”
She watched him as he scanned the fruit, picking it up and examining each for bruises. He said something to the young woman in the stall, who laughed heartily and put the fruit in a paper bag. He gave her money, she gave him change—they were animated, enjoying the moment. Aziz thought to herself, This must be what an ordinary life looks like …
The Ambitious City Page 39
