But I wasn’t a judge anymore. And I had spent enough time away from being one to know that justice isn’t always best served by her own minions and their restraining ways.
“We need a lot more,” I conceded. “First we need to know exactly how this thing works. Then we need to know whether, and if so, how, such an object could fall into the hands of a police officer or officers not authorized to use it. Then we need to know whether it was Mark and Mark alone who had access to the weapon. And then we need to know whether he did, in fact, use it.”
Aliana studied the Taser, staring at it as if it could speak to her and tell her the answers to all our questions at once.
“It won’t be hard to find out how it works,” she stated with her usual confidence. “And we can’t make the assumption that it presently belongs to or ever belonged to the Toronto police. It won’t be hard to find out whether there are private suppliers of such devices.”
She looked up with a smile. “I’ve got a friend or two who can help us understand whether any Tasers have strayed in the last little while.”
I smiled ruefully back. “In the old days, I could have asked Matt West a lot of these questions. But things have certainly changed with him.”
“He’s aiming to be chief, Ellis. I guess you must realize that by now.”
“The thought has occurred to me. But be that as it may, he’s not going to help us. In fact, if he learns we have something like this, he’ll come after us. And if he gets his hands on it, we’ll never see it again.”
Aliana did something I should have expected, but hadn’t. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small camera. She took pictures of the Taser from every angle, sometimes taking extreme close-ups. When she was finished, she put it back in the plastic bag.
I expected her to take it, but instead, she asked me for a paper towel and when I handed it to her, she carefully set the Taser on top of it on the coffee table. Then she went back to her purse, dug around for and found a bottle of hand sanitizer and gave herself a good washing.
“Give me a couple of hours,” she said.
I used the time to go down and see how Jeffrey was doing and whether he could tell me anything more about the discovery he had inadvertently made.
“As you know, Dad, it’s not the first time we’ve lost somebody down here. The police were here for hours last night asking questions, though there really wasn’t much I could say. It was an accident. Everybody who saw what happened said the same thing.”
“Who were these police? Anybody you know? Anybody who’s been down here before? Were they all in uniform?”
Jeffrey thought about that. It was now early afternoon. His sleepless night showed on his face. He rubbed his unshaven cheeks and ran his fingers through his hair. For the first time it occurred to me that his blond locks were turning gray.
“I can’t say I recognized anybody. It was dark during the whole rescue, and there were so many people…”
“Sure, son,” I said. “I think it’s time for you to go up now. I’m sure Tootie is concerned. Go and get some sleep. There’s nothing more for you to do about this down here.”
He took my advice.
I stayed in the village for an hour or so, making sure that Jeffrey’s right-hand man down there, had things running smoothly.
I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions, and I spoke to a few other of the villagers, too. Everybody was upset, surprised, exhausted. Nobody recognized any of the firemen or police officers who had attended the scene.
But one person said that he had seen a fairly young officer strolling along the river a little while before—before the river froze. The man said he’d seen “that little girl,” too, “the one that was researching her thing for school or something.”
“Was she with the police officer?”
“Not on the days I saw them. They weren’t together. The girl was with one of the villagers—an old guy that likes to tell stories about the river. He’s harmless, but I think the kid got in trouble for being down here. I never saw her again after that one day.”
“Was the cop right near the river? Could he have thrown something in?”
The villager pulled a ratty old scarf tighter around his scrawny neck. “Is there anybody alive who couldn’t have thrown something in the Don?” he asked with a croaky laugh. “We get all these environmental types down here.” He screwed up his face into a mocking snarl. “They come down here with their ideas. Acting like butter wouldn’t melt, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded.
“But I gotta tell ya, they’re a bunch of phonies. They come in their big fancy cars—and act like they don’t use gas or nothing. And they live in them condos—ten rooms for two people…” He gestured toward the high banks of the river, invisible from where we sat in the lodge, but as clear in my mind as they must have been in his.
“Right,” I said, “I get it. But I just need to know if you saw a cop throw anything into the river right before it was cold enough for it to freeze.”
“I seen that young cop down here with a couple other cops,” he said. “But the only thing they threw in the river was me!”
He roared as if he’d just made the greatest joke.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“It’s a Taser alright,” Aliana said, opening a little book and reading from her notes. “But there’s some good news and some bad news.
“The good news is that its time spent in the frozen river probably didn’t damage its data drive and we can most likely get quite a bit of information off of it still.”
“What kind of information?”
“If it had a password or a code identifying the user, it should still be on the device and—with a little help from a friend of mine—we should be able to obtain and decipher that information. It should also have a clock—like a timer—that records the date, time, and on some models, the location of each time the device was discharged within a certain set time frame.”
“Aliana, are you saying that Taser recorded exactly when it was discharged and by whom?”
She checked her notes again, but I had the feeling she was stalling. She hadn’t told me the bad news yet.
“Theoretically,” she said. “But until we get the thing to somebody who can examine it and hopefully decode it, we won’t know.”
“Can we do that? Can we get it to a decoder?”
“Most likely. I just got a few more strings to pull.”
“So that’s the bad news?”
“No, Ellis. That’s still the good news. The bad news is that the Taser did not belong to the Toronto police.
“What?”
“Apparently there are all sorts of Tasers. They’re made by more than one manufacturer, so of course different brands have different features. And there are different models. My source identified our Taser at once. And he knew that it was not the type used by the Toronto police.”
I thought about that for a moment. “So,” I said, not trying to hide the defeat in my voice, “we’ve hit another dead end.”
“No,” Aliana said firmly. “We certainly have not. We’ve got a discarded Taser and we’ve got a man who died in a high state of excitability possibly of a Taser wound. That means we’ve got a story. All we need now is the connecting incident.”
Even in my depressed state, I had to smile. Aliana had a writer’s way of looking at things. Everything was a story and all you needed was to tell it in the right way. The thought gave me an idea.
“That’s not all we have,” I suddenly realized.
“What? What are you thinking?”
“We’ve got Kezia.”
“Kezia?”
“Yes. Maybe we shouldn’t have dismissed her tale so off-handedly. She’s the only thing we have that connects every part of this story: Mark Hopequist, the Taser, the river…”
“But not the victim.”
“Wrong. If we can connect everything else, the murder will fall into place.”
“But we’ve qu
estioned Kezia. We’ve seen her again and again and we get nothing.”
“Aliana, how many times do you interview a suspect—I mean a subject—before you’re satisfied that you have the whole story?”
“As many times as I have to. As many times as it takes. But I don’t get very far just pounding them, just asking them the same questions in the same way….”
“Of course not. So that’s why we’re going to try one last time. We’re going to show Kezia the Taser.”
Aliana shook her head. “What good could that possibly do? We’ll just end up scaring her. She’ll never tell us anything again.”
“I’m not sure what exactly she has told us already,” I replied. “One more try. One more visit…”
“I don’t know. From what she told us the last time, from the way she acted, from the fact that I have the manuscript she was afraid to keep at home—from all these things, I don’t think she’s even there anymore.”
“Let’s wait until tonight,” I insisted. “Let’s try something we haven’t done before. Let’s go over there at a different time.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what that would accomplish.”
“Let’s give it a shot.”
She almost jumped when I said that. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it, too, but I wasn’t going to be stopped by fear of Kezia’s brothers. I’d never seen them. For all I knew, they were another myth in this twisted tale of danger and deception—if it was deception and not just the over-active imagination of a child who wanted to be a famous writer.
When we got to Kezia’s building, there were so many people coming and going in the lobby that we didn’t even buzz. We went straight upstairs. Coming at night made quite a difference. First of all, there was the noise—music and shouting and doors slamming….
Then there was the smoke in the hallway. Not just cigarette smoke.
We got to the apartment, and I knocked on the door.
“To tell the truth,” Aliana said. “I would be amazed if anybody answered.
I knocked again. And again.
I was about to turn away when, yes, to my amazement, the door opened a crack and a pair of wary eyes peeked out.
They were not the eyes of anyone I’d ever seen before.
“We are here to talk to Kezia,” Aliana said in a tone of voice that was halfway between velvet and steel. “She knows us. We’ve been here before.”
“She ain’t here,” a voice said, and the door opened a tiny bit. I could now make out the features of a black woman whom I judged to be in her early forties, though she had that tough, tired look that comes with a hard life and long hours.
“Could we speak to you, madam, then?” Aliana asked, her voice softening a little. “You see we’ve been helping Kezia for a little while, and we’re concerned that we haven’t talked to her in a few days.”
“What you got to talk to my girl about?”
“We were wondering about something she told us before and we just want to check it out, to make sure we heard her okay,” I offered.
The woman smiled. “My girl talk all the time. I don’t know whether she make up a story or she tell the truth....”
“That’s exactly why we have to talk to her again,” Aliana said. “Not that we think she made up a story or anything. We just need to ask her one more time about something she said.”
The door cracked open a tiny bit more. I could see that Kezia’s mother was as carefully dressed as her daughter always was. I thought she must have been either coming or going from her job. She wore a black sweater and skirt, but the plainness of her clothes—which were probably part of a uniform—was set off by elaborate but tasteful gold earrings and a thick necklace, and her hair was arranged in a cascading pile of curls that ended at and set off her finely-carved jaw. It was a beautiful face despite showing the ravages of a hard life.
“Look, Mister, Miss—you already brought trouble here. Or at least you added to it. All my kids are bein’ bothered by the cops all the time. The police are always at them about bein’ a witness to something somebody else done. My kids don’t know nothin’. They don’t know no killers. They don’t know no gangsters. They good kids. They friendly and everybody like them. So they don’t need to talk to nobody like you.”
“Mark Hopequist,” Aliana said as if she hadn’t even heard the good kid speech that we had both heard a hundred times before when the families of the victims of gang shootings expressed their shock on the TV news.
At the name, the woman’s face changed. It dropped down a few levels of belligerence.
“He the only good guy ever come around here,” the woman said. “But he disappear just like everybody else. And now my kids are disappeared, too. So if you want to talk to any of them, you’re shit out of luck.”
With that, she slammed the door in our face.
To the great amusement of five or six lanky, dread-headed boys who lifted their hands in a complicated salute to each other in mocking acknowledgement of our rejection.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“How will we find her?”
Aliana sat in my living room, her notes spread before her on my coffee table. “Where have we seen her before?” she replied.
“Only at her own apartment and…”
“And down here—I mean in the valley near the village.”
“Is it possible that she could have come back here—at the start of winter?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The only place she could have easily come down here is the village, and Jeffrey would have alerted me at once.”
“And we know of no friends, no other adults…”
“There are the counsellors at the Youth Bureau. Might she have contacted them?”
A quick check eliminated that possibility.
“Mark.”
“What?”
“Maybe she sought out Mark. Maybe she’s with him now.”
We stared at each other for a second.
“Let’s go!” Aliana said.
We never got there. We never even set out. Because Kezia got to us first. The minute Aliana and I opened the door of my apartment, we heard frantic footsteps pounding down the hall.
The girl was running as though she were being chased, but there was no one behind her that I could see. Her face was streaming with tears and her t-shirt was dirty and ripped. A light jacket—not nearly warm enough for the weather—was hanging unbuttoned from her slender shoulders.
She ran straight into Aliana’s arms, and I could see how she was shaking from crying and from the powerful fear that seemed to have gripped her.
“They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill us all….”
Aliana didn’t try to calm her down. I unlocked my apartment and dragged them both in, drawing the deadbolt.
I led them to the couch and Aliana sank down with the girl in her arms.
I was as shocked at the sight of them as I was to hear Kezia’s frantic, inarticulate cries. The last time anyone had held someone in their arms on that couch, it was I. It was Queenie in my arms. And I was comforting her before the ambulance had come to take her away from our home forever.
I felt as though I were being thrust back in time, as though I weren’t really here and it weren’t really now.
I whispered a prayer. I whispered a prayer to Queenie. If there was anybody in heaven, it would surely be her. “Help me, Queenie,” I said. “Help me to save this kid. Help me to keep my promise.”
“Could you get us some water?” Aliana asked, and I sprang into action to do so, though the way Kezia was gasping and choking, I was afraid to let her drink.
But she gulped down the water as if she hadn’t drunk anything in a long time, and within a few seconds, she was able to catch her breath and to stop shaking.
Aliana began to talk to her in a soft, soothing voice. “You’re okay now. You’re safe. We’re here and we’ll protect you. Just take it easy.”
The girl’s breathing slowed. She to
ok a couple of deep breaths. She dried her eyes with her fingers, until Aliana came up with a little packet of tissues.
“You want to tell me what’s wrong?” she finally said.
Slowly the girl began to tell her tale. “There’s a war now,” she said. “There’s a gang war and I’ll get killed if I say anything or tell anybody’s name or like that.” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath that shook her slender shoulders, but she carried on. “My one brother belongs to one gang and my other brother, he has ties to a different gang. Now there’s a war and they are supposed to kill one another and they have rules and the rules say that they don’t have to worry about anybody who gets in the way. They could shoot them, too.”
Aliana kept her arm around the girl during this exchange. It occurred to me how I had gradually seen so many other sides to her than just the hard-nosed reporter. But I kept totally silent, not wanting to interrupt or to throw things off track in any way.
“Kezia, nobody is going to shoot you. I promise you that.”
“No! The girl pulled away. “No. Nobody can promise I won’t get shot. I’m not afraid for me.”
“Whose safety are you concerned about?” Aliana asked carefully.
There was another volley of tears and shakes. When the girl finally regained her composure, she said, “My mother. I don’t want those assholes to hurt my mom!”
“They won’t,” Aliana insisted. “There are plenty of people who can help you. We’ll call the police…”
“They can’t help.”
“How about Mark?” I interjected. “Would you feel better if you talked to him?”
“He isn’t a police officer anymore.”
Aliana and I exchanged glances.
“How do you know that, Kezia?” I asked.
“He told me. He told me the day before yesterday.”
“You saw him?” I asked. “Where? Where did you go to meet him?”
Kezia smiled. “At the Youth Bureau.”
“But they said they hadn’t seen you.”
Don't Forget You Love Me Page 21
