by R. D. Cain
He tapped his pen on the paper. “Late teens, female, blond, thin.”
“Nastos, you’re asking me to data-mine the entire system. It would take over an hour just to print off all the reports this will generate.”
Nastos was hoping Jacques would come to that conclusion. “Okay,” he said, “here’s an idea. Send the request down to Sharon McLean in Records. Tell her it’s for Inspector Koche and that he has someone coming by to pick it up today.”
Jacques made a sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Koche? Hearing that name makes me want to be sick.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, wait a minute. How is sending it down in his name going to help? Is he your buddy now?”
“No, I’m going to get a friend to go in and pick it up. That’s if she ever gets back here.”
Nastos waited around the office for another twenty minutes before deciding to forget about Hopkins; he was pissed off enough by all the waiting that he was ready to get the files himself. Now that he was no longer a cop, impersonating an officer to pick up confidential files from the records department was beyond a penalty-box infraction. If caught, he would be criminally charged and sentenced to jail — again. But Lindsay Bannerman couldn’t wait for freedom of information requests and faxed reports that would be heavily redacted and illegible. He had little choice.
He put on his detective’s jacket and tie, and he knew the procedure for picking up files. The real risk was being recognized.
He was halfway to the door when the phone rang and he went back to answer it. He hoped that it was Carscadden calling to stop him from doing something stupid. “Carscadden Law Firm.”
A man spoke, slurring so badly he was barely understandable. He said, “Ken Carscadden.”
Nastos couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. He thought for a moment, trying to figure out what the guy wanted. Finally he said, “No, this is the law offices of Kevin Carscadden, you must have —”
“No, I’m Ken Carscadden, aren’t you listening?”
Now Nastos was lost. Who’s this asshole?
The man said, “I’m looking for my son. Who the hell are you?”
Now it makes sense. “I’m Steve Nastos, his business —”
Ken’s tone relaxed considerably. “You’re that cop that Kevin helped.”
Nastos briefly considered pulling the chair out, but he didn’t want to talk to a drunk on the phone all day, even if it was Carscadden’s dad. “Yeah, your son really saved my ass. He’s a good lawyer, he’s just not here. So I’ll tell him you —”
“Don’t bother, don’t bother. He never calls back anyways.” The man hung up, leaving Nastos staring at the phone, wondering if the conversation had ever happened.
Nastos parked in the underground parking at Forty College Street. The last time he had been there was to turn in his badge and other police gear: the gun belt that no longer fit, winter coats he’d never worn, a ticket book he rarely used, radio clips, everything except the baton, pepper spray and gun that had already been seized back when he was arrested. Barging into the chief’s office with two garbage bags of gear and dumping them on his desk while he sat there slack-jawed with a phone up to his ear was a bittersweet memory. He tried to tell himself that he became an urban legend that day — as if he’d won the lottery and quit in style. Unfortunately, the truth was that he had been forced out, no matter how much he tried to take pride in the smallest of skirmishes; it was hard to ignore that he’d lost the war.
The elevator was narrow with a glass back wall. He pressed Floor Three to go to Records. When the door opened, there were half a dozen people standing there to get on. They were all civilians, except for one street cop who seemed to be on a mail run, holding a milk crate full of manila envelopes.
Nastos exited and turned right to go down the hallway. He had told himself so many times that it was urgent that he get the records as soon as possible that the idea that he might be doing this for the excitement was almost completely suppressed. He needed something to get the blood flowing again, or maybe just to thumb his nose at the organization.
The glass door had Records stencilled on it. He reached into his pocket, put his cell phone to his ear and opened the door. There were two detectives in line ahead of him and no one at the counter. Nastos recognized one cop from somewhere, but couldn’t put a place to the name he remembered. When the officer saw Nastos, he smiled and hit his partner on the shoulder.
“Well, if it isn’t Nasty Nastos. How the hell are you?”
“Nasty, just like always. How you doing, Phil?”
Phil turned to the other detective. “This is Steve Nastos — we used to work together in Thirty-One when we first pulled into town on the turnip truck. He was the guy with that dentist thing, you remember that?”
The cop’s eyes opened in surprise. “Holy shit.” He stuck his hand out. “Ian Fenton, nice to meet you.”
Phil interrupted. “What brings you by, Nastos?”
He picked up a stack of Freedom of Information requests. “I work for an insurance company now. I need to order some records.”
Phil exhaled and jabbed his thumb at the counter. “Good luck getting anything today. Some big wheel from upstairs has them all running around like heads with their chickens cut off. Typical bullshit.”
A woman came back to the counter. She had bookish good looks, with her hair back in a bun and stylish glasses. He saw from the name tag that this was the McLean woman that he had been talking to on the phone earlier.
“Here you go guys, sorry for the delay.” She avoided eye contact like she had overheard Phil’s complaint and felt personally responsible.
Both Phil and Ian smiled. Ian said, “Hey, thanks.”
They turned to leave. Phil held the door open for Ian, who was carrying the most files. “Nice seeing you, Nastos — gimme a call sometime if you want to grab a beer.”
“You got it, Phil. See you.”
Nastos had his phone up to his face with a hand over the mouthpiece like he had been in a conversation with someone. After Phil left, he put a finger up to ask the girl to wait a second and spoke into his cell.
“I’m here right now, Inspector Koche. So I should be back within the half hour. Sorry sir, traffic was . . . from who, sir? Jacques? Lapierre? Sure, I’ll get them, too. Okay, but —” He stared at the display screen on the phone, feigning confusion at an imaginary hang-up, then closed the cell phone and put it back in his pocket. He shook his head and said to the girl at the counter, “Inspector Koche is a fucking asshole, if you’ll pardon my street language.”
Her head tilted to one side. “You’re here for him?” Nastos could see that she was wondering if she should hate him by association.
“Yeah. That narcissist, power-tripping tyrant is my boss. Lucky me. There’s apparently a lot of Versadex reports here for him. He also just said something about Jacques Lapierre having something for me too, I’m just not sure if that’s a first name or a last name.” Nastos offered her his cell phone. “Maybe you’d like to call him and ask. I really don’t feel like taking the risk of setting him off.”
She recoiled from the phone as if it were covered in gonorrhea bacteria. “One second, please.” She left the counter and disappeared into a back room. Nastos waited. He’d had his fun; now he just wanted to make a clean getaway. The woman came back to the desk with a banker’s box. She heaved it up onto the counter. It landed with a dull thud.
She slid over the sign-in book. “The Lapierre files are in there too.” Nastos wrote down something illegible and lifted the banker’s box. Sharon hit a button on the counter and the power assist opened the door for Nastos. Nastos smiled. “Thanks, Sharon, you’re the best.”
16
Nastos was relieved to exit the Police Records Unit. Headquarters was the kind of place that was swarming with people who were co
ps in name only. They carried badges and talked tough, but hadn’t been on the road for years. Accommodated because they couldn’t handle night shifts, promoted because they worked out, drank or golfed with the right people — whatever the reason, they had positioned themselves in HQ for straight days and light work. He’d feel more comfortable raiding a drug den or a biker clubhouse than this place.
He walked the hallway to the elevator lobby and pressed the button to go down. Once at his car, he put the box in the trunk and drove back to the office.
Traffic was starting to pick up again. On Yonge Street, the homeless had woken and taken their positions at the street corners, out front of the McDonald’s, sitting in doorways, with their hats out, hands out, anything out to collect loose change. Most people ignored them. Tourists and teenagers were the most likely to even notice them and to cave in.
Nastos parked and paid the meter, returned to the car to put the white parking tag in the windshield, then brought the banker’s box out of the trunk and carried it into the office. The door chimed. Hopkins was sitting in her desk, reading her mystery novel. She didn’t look up from the book when she spoke.
“Don’t go in the office.”
Nastos put the box on the counter in front of Hopkins. “Why not?”
Hopkins folder down a page and put the book next to her keyboard.
“Kevin needs some rest.”
“Rest,” Nastos confirmed. “As in, he’s sleeping during the day?”
She shrugged. “He arrived here in a cab, smells like a brewery, collapsed on the couch and hasn’t moved since.”
“Chip off the old block, eh?”
Hopkins perked up. “Huh?”
Nastos wasn’t sure he’d be staying; he peeled his coat off anyway because Hopkins kept the heat at a perfectly reasonable seventy-six. “I was here earlier. His dad, Ken, called. He was wasted.”
Hopkins exhaled, like she had been bracing herself for bad news.
Nastos asked, “What am I missing?”
“His mom’s not doing well.”
“Is she sick?”
“Yeah, sick of his dad. Ken’s got the disease, and he’s off the wagon, hitting it hard. The only reason that Kevin’s the man he is is because of her. Kevin’s a gentleman because she raised him to be one. But he drinks because of what his dad did to him.” She stood up and straightened her skirt. “Buy me a water in the lunch room.”
“Sure.”
Nastos filled two glasses with tap water and they took seats across from each other at the lunch table. Nastos peeked out to make sure the office door was still closed. There were no signs of life.
She asked, “What do you know about his upbringing?”
Nastos sighed and rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants. “I think I first suspected something was seriously wrong when I learned that they were a pair of west-coast Leafs fans.”
“Do you two take anything seriously?”
Nastos shrugged. Looks like it’s time to get serious. He’d worked with a few cops that drank too much. Sometimes a hint or two was enough to get some people to back it off. He’d tried that with Carscadden and it hadn’t worked. And being passed-out drunk in the middle of a workday was pathetic. “Well, our boy has an alcohol problem. Looks like he’s having a relapse. He doesn’t seem like he’s addicted, though. I wonder what’s going on.”
Hopkins was staring through the table, lost in thought.
Nastos waved his hand in front of Hopkins to break her from her trance. “I know a guy.”
“You know a guy, what?”
Nastos refilled his bottle of water from the tap, taking a long drink. “After the mess with Josie and that dead asshole, I — well, the whole family — we went to counselling with this guy who came recommended. He was really good. He’s a Ph.D. in psychology. Madeleine thought he looked like Johnny Depp, except with blue eyes.”
Hopkins didn’t look overly disappointed by the physical description.
“We called him No Frills Mills. I’ll give him a call.” Nastos pulled out his phone and started scrolling through numbers.
“Why No Frills?”
“He gets right to the point. People have defense mechanisms; no one ever wants to change. He has this way of telling you that you’re a big idiot without it being insulting. He deals with things quickly. He also dresses in T-shirts and jeans. His place looks like a tattoo parlour.”
Hopkins looked let down. “Oh, man.”
Nastos had to smile. “Did that ruin the fantasy?”
She shrugged. “I guess I don’t mind a few tattoos.” Now that Hopkins was warmed up, she obviously wanted to keep talking. “How are you and Madeleine doing?”
He sighed. Here we go. There was no woman he could talk to about Maddy except Hopkins. The two had become friends and Hopkins knew something was wrong already. “My ‘selfish need for excitement’ is getting in the way of our prosperity.” Nastos didn’t have Tara Hopkins’ complete resume, but he knew she was street-smart. Her dad was a tyrant who was a self-employed plumber. She had nicknamed him Angry Angelo. He was a control freak about everything. She had bailed at eighteen and tended bar or worked retail most of her life. Meeting Carscadden was the best thing that could have happened to her.
Nastos felt a connection with her more intuitively than he did with Madeleine. Hopkins was the kind of girl who, if someone broke into her house and came at her, would pull the trigger without the slightest hesitation. Madeleine once called the police because a bat flew into the house.
“I don’t think that finding a lost little girl is selfish. And hey, I work here. It’s hardly exciting. I think your wife has security problems. It’s like she’s outsourced all of her own protective instincts to you. And when you don’t do what makes her feel safe, she freaks out.”
“Yeah. If I tell her to toughen up, she thinks I’m abandoning her.”
Hopkins exhaled, saying nothing. After a while, she smiled. “You know, she described you to me in a way I found interesting. She said your natural instinct is to do everything yourself, just like a body that rejects a donated heart. You’d rather shun foreign intrusion, even if it means death. Trust comes slowly to you.”
Nastos didn’t say anything. He thought about the partners he’d had to work with over the years; there had only been two he trusted. But how many people do most people trust with both their lives and livelihood? Jacques was still in Sexual Assault; he had trained an ex-partner named Karen in the detective’s office — she quit fifteen years in, to become a journalist, of all things. He was just better working alone, agile and efficient. No one else was worthy of trust.
Hopkins interrupted his thoughts. “When I first met Kevin two years ago, it was like he was my knight in shining armour. On the other hand, he’s also a lost little boy, and they kind of balance each other out. Now, with the drinking — I’ve dated a drinker before — I know what that ride is like. Maybe I’m getting too lazy, but I want someone in my life who wants me, doesn’t just need me. He needs to save me and needs me to save him. I’m not sure how much love is there sometimes.”
“He loves you, Tara — hell, he’s obsessed with you, and I don’t blame him. I’ll call Mills. You’re going to like what he can do.” Nastos finished his bottle of water. “Well, I’m out of here. I don’t want to wake him up, so I can work from home.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hmmm . . . pick Josie up from school, go home and make something for dinner, then spend the night reading a box of reports. Sure as hell beats Carscadden snoring beer breath.”
17
Thursday, October 25
Nastos sat at the reception desk, reading through the files he had appropriated from the police records department. Voices from the office, though muffled and quiet, were still distracting. He took no pleasure in knowing that Carscadden was being dissected by Mills while Hopki
ns sat there with a front-row seat on the other side of the office door. Nastos went to the 680 News Radio website and listened to the broadcast to provide Carscadden some privacy. The channel advised the upcoming repeat of the fifteen-minute news cycle. Nastos made a point of listening. The headline story made him terrified once more that Lindsay had been found, dead.
A reporter began, “Another body has been found in the Junction Triangle area of Toronto, near Lansdowne Avenue and Dupont Street. Police aren’t releasing any details; however, police spokesperson Constable Lee did not deny that there may be a link to the previous suspicious death just a few days ago, dubbed the ‘Sorrow Slayings’ by a police insider who asked not to be identified.”
The voice of the police spokesperson came on. “Our investigation is in the earliest possible stages. We don’t want to speculate as to any linkage to the other body found. We aren’t ruling it out either. It’s important at this stage that we keep open minds and let the evidence lead the investigation.”
Nastos turned to the reports in his hands. He flipped through and found what he was looking for. Which girl had been gone for exactly thirty days? He said “Andrea Dobson” out loud to himself.
He read her complete file, then set it aside, rushing to read through the next reports. He turned to the pile dedicated to suspicious persons, which could turn out to be poorly investigated botched abductions. Two reports of suspicious persons offered some kind of a lead — two different girls, both in their teens, thin with long hair, described being creeped out while walking past a van on separate days. Both girls reported looking back over their shoulders, with a feeling that they were being watched. One girl saw nothing, only glare on the glass; the other described a man with a dark complexion staring at her. He looked to be in his forties and had a muscular frame.
If there had not been other people around, the girls said, they would have felt unsafe. Both instances had been reported as suspicious persons to police, and both had occurred before Lindsay Bannerman disappeared. One girl reported it because her dad made her, the other because she was concerned that the man seemed predatory. She described him in the report as if he were a lion from the Discovery Channel, like he was stalking a gazelle.
