by R. D. Cain
Carscadden slid open the night table’s drawers, not entirely surprised to find sex toys and condoms in the top two. A couple dozen dime bags of marijuana were scattered inside the bottom drawer, along with a few baggies of cocaine. He brought them out with him and dumped them on the floor in front of Jessica’s face.
Nastos smiled. “Well, well, well. Looky what we have here.”
“You’re not cops,” she said.
Nastos smiled to himself. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jessica. We’re the Facebook Police, and it seems that you’ve violated our policy and slandered —”
“Libelled,” Carscadden corrected.
“Libelled,” Nastos continued, “a person online, and we can’t have that, now can we?”
A dense scowl of utter confusion washed over her face. The accusations and the drugs on the ground in front of her were giving her too many things to think about.
When Carscadden saw her laptop computer on the kitchen table, he cleared a stack of garbage off of a chair with one kick and dragged it over. He wiggled the mouse to bring up the screen and opened her internet browser. There was a bookmark for Facebook. She didn’t have the password saved, so he needed her to log in.
Nastos had been watching Carscadden and saw the problem. Keeping one hand on her wrist, he moved the other to her belt and started dragging her up to her feet. “Okay, up we go, darling.”
He pushed her over to the screen. “Log in right now.” He gave her arm a hard yank.
She told Carscadden her email address and the password. Her Facebook home screen opened. Carscadden found the page that she had created about Bannerman.
He spoke while he typed. “I want to apologize for what I said about Mr. Bannerman. I was on coke and upset about my missing friend. I made it all up because I was angry and needed someone to take it out on. I’m just a pathetic, one-hundred-dollar-an-hour coke whore and I hope you’ll all forgive me for saying such bad things about a good man.”
Jessica was crying. There was snot on her face, her cheeks were red and her mouth was contorted in grief rather than pain.
Carscadden navigated to the settings page and changed Jessica’s password to random gibberish before logging out of her account.
Nastos let her drop to the floor, then stepped over her to reach the computer. He flipped the laptop over, slid out the battery and put it in his pocket, ensuring that she couldn’t get into any more trouble for a while. Even if she had a password recovery system in place, the battery in his pocket ensured that Bannerman was safe for a while.
As much as Carscadden would rather have seen Nastos smash the computer apart, that would have been going further than he and Nastos had planned. Jessica was just an unsophisticated cokehead. They been rough enough to speak her language; no more was required.
Carscadden saw her cell phone on the counter and considered breaking it, then decided it was more valuable cloned.
Nastos straightened his shirt and tie. “We don’t fight fair, Jessica, so don’t get any funny ideas about calling the cops, or we’ll call our friends at the Teeth Police.”
They left out the front door, letting the screen swing shut behind them. Carscadden said, “I think that went well.”
Nastos said, “It was a lot more effective than writing a nasty letter threatening legal action.”
Carscadden pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through messages. “You mind driving?” He handed his keys to Nastos.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Carscadden checked BlackBerry Messenger, email, text messages and recent calls. Hopkins had not been in touch since she had left for Anthony’s place. He dialed her number and it went straight to voicemail. He hung up and dialed another number from memory.
“Hey, what’s up?” Madeleine sounded surprised to hear from him. She didn’t sound like she’d been drinking, which she and Hopkins usually did when they got together. Maybe they’re abstaining, for the time being, to make things easier on me. “Is Tara with you?”
“No?” She replied as if she was asking a question. “She’s not at the office?”
“She never came back. She’s not answering her cell, she hasn’t called, nothing.”
“Is Steve with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, tell him to call when he knows what’s going on.”
Carscadden hung up with a sick feeling rising in his stomach. Tara never missed calls; she lived with her phone as much as anyone. Nastos was driving south to the office. He looked thoughtful and preoccupied. Carscadden asked, “What do you think?”
“I think I feel like an asshole for having her deliver that letter.”
Carscadden asked, “You think Anthony might have done something? Gay, psychic Anthony? There’s not a violent bone in his body. Hell, Hopkins would kick his ass.”
Nastos shrugged and sighed. “That Toronto Today article on Anthony was the first to put together that the first girl was missing exactly thirty days. How could they have known that?” He handed his cell to Carscadden. “Here, look up the address book and get a hold of Bannerman’s buddies at the phone companies.”
“Tap her cell?”
“No.” Nastos merged at the Eastern Avenue exit from the Don Valley Parkway. “No, they can trace her GPS signature. We can see where she went.”
Carscadden said, “Well, we know she went to Anthony’s — let’s just go there.”
Nastos said, “That’s the point; we have no idea if she made it there. We can’t assume anything.”
Carscadden scrolled through the phone, then called Rod to ask for the GPS trace.
“One sec,” Rod responded. There was a click as the call went on hold.
Nastos turned up Sackville Street, minutes away from the office.
Carscadden unlocked the law office’s front door, disappointed to find that Hopkins wasn’t inside. It was close to dinner time. She was definitely AWOL. He was beginning to wonder if he should call around to the hospitals, or to the cops to see if her car had been towed or in an accident.
Nastos closed the door behind him as he came inside, speaking into his phone. “No problem, Rod. It’s me, Steve Nastos — we parked so I could take the phone back. Listen, we need some help here.” He gave Rod the phone number to trace, then sat down at Hopkins’ desk. “We need a GPS history. You’re going to see the registrant is Tara Hopkins. She works with us. As a result of the investigation, she’s disappeared.”
Carscadden heard Rod’s voice squeak from the phone. “Really?”
“Yeah. The last we know she delivered something to a person of interest; now she’s” — he glanced to Carscadden — “unavailable.”
As Nastos sat at the desk, scribbling notes on Hopkins’ writing pad, Carscadden felt for some reason that he was invading her territory. Nastos wrote down words and drew arrows at times, all upside down from his perspective so he couldn’t read it. When he walked around the desk to see better, Nastos stood up and became more animated.
“Okay, Rod. Thanks. Hey, that’s a great idea. We really owe you. Bye.” Nastos put his phone away. “Rod’s going to clone her phone. We’ll hear if she has any conversations and they’ll be recorded immediately.”
This wasn’t comforting to Carscadden. “So where has she been?”
Nastos seemed evasive. “The GPS was in and out, so at times the trace was using a triangulation from towers — it wasn’t very accurate.”
Carscadden stuck his hand out. “Give me the paper.”
Nastos said, “No.”
“Give me the fucking paper, asshole!”
Nastos picked up the office phone and dialed three numbers: nine, one, one. “Yes, I need to report a missing person.” He cupped the phone. “She’s transferring us to the police.” He handed the phone to Carscadden. Carscadden reached for it, holding it awkwardly. He was on hold again, except
this time, judging by the annoying music, it sounded more like he was on Ignore.
Nastos was leaving through the front door. He stopped to say, “I’m going to do something, Kevin, and it’s best you stay out of it for now.”
Nastos closed the door to the law office and started for the car. He noticed the air cooling; the weather was shifting. The sky to the west had a red cast as the sun retreated for the evening. Nastos dialed Madeleine’s cell.
She picked up quickly. “Hey, what’s up?”
Nastos asked, “Are you sitting down?”
“Yeah, I’m at the kitchen table. Jo and I are having yogurt and berries.”
“Well, give her an extra berry for me.”
“We split your berries. So what’s going on?”
“I’m about to do something impulsive and stupid.”
Madeleine sighed. “Oh, for god’s sake, Steven.”
“Exactly. Carscadden’s at the office. I had to ditch him there.”
“Well, why don’t you want him with you?”
“Because I’m probably going to get arrested and I’ll want him to bail me out.”
20
Bannerman sat in his car holding an envelope of cash. He was parked at College and Palmerston Streets in Little Italy and was scrolling through the address book of his BlackBerry. When he found the name Damian Valentine, the man he had found on Craigslist, he dialed the number.
Damian answered, “Talk to me.”
“Yes, this is Craig — we spoke earlier.”
There was a pause before he spoke. “Right, right. Craig.”
Bannerman sucked air. “Listen, I’m in the neighbourhood and I brought the cash with me.”
Valentine perked up. “You brought the cash?”
Bannerman squeezed the envelope, feeling the thickness of it, in case the one thousand dollars in non-sequential twenties had somehow vanished into thin air.
“Yeah, that was the deal, wasn’t it?”
Valentine did not respond.
“Listen, Mr. Valentine, I told you I was serious the last time we spoke. If you can’t help me out, someone else will.”
“Okay, okay, take it easy man, I can help you out.” Valentine gave him the address and Bannerman walked the rest of the way. He had a sneaking suspicion that the address for the purchase was not going to be a sturdy, nineteenth-century mansion with original gingerbread trim like most of the houses around here. He was right. Bannerman found the small Cash Converters on College Street. Damian Valentine was sitting at the counter wearing a sky-blue shirt and white name tag.
Bannerman extended his hand. “Mr. Valentine, nice to meet you. I’m Craig Bannerman.” He felt that it was important to be as professional as possible with a man like Valentine, and was irritated when Valentine looked at his hand like he’d never seen one before and smiled like a bewildered grade-school kid. Valentine shook his hand, limp-wristed and reluctantly, holding the goofy smile.
“So you came here to buy a gun? Is that right, Mr. Bannerman?”
Bannerman opened his overcoat and produced his wallet. He dropped the stack of twenties on the glass display table. The pile slowly expanded like a Slinky, ready to take the next step down.
Valentine eyed the money greedily, like it was part of a magic trick. Slowly he prodded it and began to count.
Bannerman was impatient. He heard a racket in the back room, then another man came out. White, as skinny as a pitchfork and riddled with tattoos. The way a vampire smells blood, this druggie had smelled the cash. After watching Valentine feeding on the stack of twenties, which quickly disappeared into his hand, he looked at Bannerman with profound interest. He said, “And what brings you by today? You don’t need a loan, do you?”
Bannerman said, “No thanks.”
Valentine said, “It’s okay, boss, I’ve got it.”
Bannerman was growing impatient. “There’s the cash, where’s my gun?”
The white guy smiled when Valentine said, “It’s close by.”
“Good, then go get it. I don’t have all day.”
“Hey, don’t get pushy with me, old man. You don’t come into my place of business and piss in the corner. You can just wait here with my colleague, and I’ll be right back.”
Bannerman chewed his lip. He had no idea what the standard procedure was when buying an illegal gun. Was it his imagination or did he detect a surreptitious conversation between these two men? It was as if they were communicating by telepathy, and he did not like the vibe. He stomach felt like it was up in his throat and he wanted to get out of there, fast.
“Hey, you’re right. I apologize. I’m just in a hurry.”
Valentine said, “Well, we run on island time. I’ll be right back. Now was that the Glock seventeen or the Glock twenty-two?”
He was trying to recall the research he had done on the net. The nine-millimetre had less recoil and was easier to control. “The nine mill.”
Valentine smiled broadly. “Right, the seventeen. One second.”
When he disappeared into the back room, Bannerman was left out front with the skinny drug addict. He wore a name tag that said Muggy Mayhem.
“So what line of work are you in?” Pitchfork — Mayhem — asked.
“Finance,” Bannerman said.
“Hey.” Mayhem didn’t smile. “Me too.”
The silence from the back room was suspicious; this was taking too long. Walking out, however, wasn’t an option; it was what they probably wanted him to do. He checked the time. His wife was at home without him. Lindsay was gone, and the man who had ultimately caused all of this, the one who had killed her mother, was somewhere out there. In that moment, Bannerman began pouring into his vision of Darius Miner all of the hurt and evil ever caused in the world. It was people like Darius who destroyed lives, sucked the life out of people and moved on, like a one-man plague of locusts, exhausting everyone and everything of all they had to offer, all of the world’s beauty.
I’m not a religious person, but if there is a god, let me know in my heart that Lindsay is alive. He silenced the hateful monologue in his mind, but felt nothing other than utterly alone. That’s it, he decided; if God can take Lindsay, then I can send Darius to hell. He knew where Darius was. The only obstacles stopping him from killing Darius were Valentine and Pitchfork. Once he was past them, nothing could stop him from doing his small part to make the world a better place.
Bannerman asked, “What’s taking so long?” He began to walk around the counter. Pitchfork approached him with his hands up, but he was no longer intimidating. Bannerman figured if he punched him hard enough in the face, his entire head would break off.
“Hey, just wait a minute; he has a ways to go.”
“He said it was close by.” Bannerman inched toward Pitchfork, then shoved him back into the wall. He called out, “Valentine. Where the hell are you?” Bannerman peeked into the back room. There was a staircase that went up; Bannerman knew he had not gone up there. He glanced the other way and saw an open back door. Pitchfork staggered up, his collarbones visible through his shirt, his neck thin like an anorexic’s.
Bannerman peeked out the back door and saw nothing but alleyway. He turned the other way and saw Valentine, who lunged at him right away, grabbing at his collar for leverage. Valentine fought like a hockey player, controlling Bannerman with one hand and raining punches down with the other. Bannerman instinctively ducked down to avoid the blows and dove at Valentine’s waist. Out of practice from his days in Shiloh, Manitoba, Bannerman missed with one hand and had to fumble with the other until he caught a good grip of Valentine. With both hands, he pulled Valentine in tight, then picked him up and dropped him to the ground. Pitchfork came out of the store, but one hard punch in the face from Bannerman knocked him back headfirst into the steel door. He landed hard and stayed down. Valentine came at him again, so Bannerman dek
ed to the other side of a dumpster.
“You’re a piece of shit, Valentine.”
“Tell that to the cops. Trying to buy an illegal gun.”
“Fuck you, you piece of shit.” Bannerman caught a glimpse of something on Valentine’s face. The way his eyes darted to Pitchfork, lying in a heap on the ground. It was fear. Bannerman advanced from the dumpster, thrusting his hands in the air. “Here I am, tough guy.” He moved toward Valentine. “Come on, tough guy, it’s just you and me.”
Valentine shook his head and smiled. “No, thanks. I have everything I needed from you.”
Bannerman charged, “Well, I haven’t.”
He shoved Valentine backward into the wall, then grabbed him by the neck. He squeezed hard, until he felt that Valentine was going to slip away. So Bannerman let him — but not before pushing Valentine back into the brick wall, and hammering him with a three-punch combination. Valentine’s knees buckled and he dropped to the ground next to Pitchfork, sucking air. Valentine’s head sagged from side to side as he tried clumsily to push Bannerman away. Bannerman kicked him in the ribs, then noticed his fat front pocket. He reached in and seized his money back; Valentine didn’t protest.
He was about to leave, but he turned back to Valentine. It was a hollow victory if he didn’t get what he came for. “Where’s the gun? You can still have the money.”
Valentine shook his head. Bannerman pushed him to the ground and ran back into the store. He searched behind the counter until he saw a black handgrip. Two extra magazines sat next to the gun. “Fuck you, and have a nice day, Mr. Valentine.”
21
Nastos pulled to a stop in front of Anthony’s house and prepared himself for what was next. He reread the sheet of paper on which he had scribbled the GPS location of Hopkins’ phone before it had turned off. Rod had tried turning the feature on again, remotely, but it had failed to work. Either the battery was dead or the phone was destroyed.
From his notes, Hopkins had gone out for lunch with his wife, Madeleine, to take turns fawning over No Frills Mills the Sensitive, then gone over to Anthony’s house to serve the papers. She wasn’t there long. It looked like she had gone to a park around the corner and turned her phone off.
