At three in the morning on the sixteenth, they extracted a dead girl from the pit. Her body was still warm. Above, through the pipe, Ray talked to Volkov. “I still hear the breathing,” she said. “And I hear the machines.”
“We’re almost there.”
“You know who is breathing?”
“No,” he lied. He tried to listen for the breathing, but he could only hear her voice, thready and faint, scraping against the inside of the steel tube.
“I want to shake the hand of your polisman. For what he did.”
“I hope you will,” he said. Then the excavators were through again and they called to them and both Hazel and Ray Greene went over to see what they had found. Wingate was face down, half buried in an inverted cone of earth, but his upper half was free; his head wasn’t injured. But his pelvis was crushed, and his pale skin suggested he’d lost blood, although there was not much blood in evidence. The paramedic who’d been waiting in the field since eight o’clock pronounced Wingate in hypovolemic shock. More than 40 per cent of his blood was floating around inside of him. The rest of the excavation was rushed: he was too close to death to be careful getting him out.
He was “alive.” This is what Hazel heard when the doctors talked. It seemed to be a matter of opinion. Some people made it out of this kind of thing, some didn’t. It was better to be young.
He lay in the ICU of Mayfair General bundled up like a baby with layers of gauze. Allowances had been made in his wrappings for IVs and tubes and he appeared to be something that had been caught in a web and bound in silk. The spider took the form of the machines that stood sentry beside and behind him, unspooling their webbing on screens in shuddering lines of red, green, and blue. The doctors had induced a coma to keep him deeply asleep, and in the hour Hazel sat in the chair beside him, six doctors and three nurses paused within the curtained space to mark something on a chart, or adjust a drip, or just to gaze at what was the day’s most interesting case.
Touch-and-go. That was the term they settled on. Greene checked in over the phone. There was an active collection of evidence going on in the field and below in the river and grove, and he had to stay on top of it, although she could hear his anxiety and concern. He’d been there the day James Wingate arrived in Port Dundas. They had not worked together long, but he’d liked James, and Hazel knew he was looking forward to working with him again. Greene filled her in on what they were finding. Katrina Volkov had been successfully extracted, and she was in another room in Mayfair General. That room had been a rough dirt chamber with a heavy door in a concrete frame in one wall, and not much else. It appeared that Wingate had used his flat steel belt-buckle to carve out shallow crawl spaces, about half a metre wide, in two of the corners. Volkov had tucked into one; the girl called Star had been found close to the other one. Wingate had just started his when the roof came down. Volkov kept saying she wanted to shake his hand. She was in love with him, she said. She was in shock.
Hyperspecialized specialists were being sent in to register their opinions. She overheard one doctor discussing the value of removing the top of Wingate’s skull to “give the brain room.”
No one would give her specifics. She was not his next of kin. She knew Greene was trying to look into it, but Wingate had never spoken of siblings or parents. She called Jack Deacon at home, and an hour later, he came into the hospital just as they were taking Wingate away for surgery.
“They have to do some work on him,” he told her after talking to a colleague.
“Do I want to know?”
“I don’t think so.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You know they’ll do whatever they can.”
“That’s what they say on TV shows before someone dies.”
“He’s strong. He’ll fight. But it’s not good.”
“Give me a number. Chance he’ll survive.”
“He’s going to have a long road.”
“Chance he’ll survive.”
“I don’t know.”
“Better than fifty?”
“Sure. Better than fifty.”
“How much.”
“I don’t know, Hazel. I wish I could tell you.”
They were bringing someone else into what had been Wingate’s bed. An elderly man with a grey face. She began to explain that the space was taken, but one of the interns told her they needed the bed. The man who’d been here was going to be in recovery for a while, when he got out of the ER.
“Come on,” said Deacon. “You should go home. I’ll call you if I hear anything. Go home.”
But she couldn’t. She stayed in the hospital waiting room and read magazines and fretted. When Greene learned where she was, he called her and ordered her to go home and get some sleep. She snorted at him and hung up and then turned the cell off so no one else could suggest she do something else with her time. Twice, hospital employees came out and asked her if she was Hazel Micallef because there was a phone call for her. Both times she declined to accept her identity. She knew her mother would be asleep and any other news from the outside world she had no interest in at all.
She was woken by a hand on her shoulder gently shaking her, and she opened her eyes and it was James Wingate. He looked fine. It was possible she wasn’t awake. Maybe the surgery had worked and it wasn’t so serious after all. Or this was a dream and he’d come to tell her he was dead. She held his hand down on her shoulder, and the hand was corporeal and she was awake. “What time is it?”
“Seven in the morning.”
“You don’t sound like James, but –”
“I’m Michael.” He took his hand off her shoulder. “I gather you don’t know about me.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a complicated story. But I’m the next of kin. I got a call.”
“Well,” she said, unsure what role she was to play here, “I’m sorry you’re being … reunited under these circumstances. What did they tell you?”
“Severe internal bleeding. Broken pelvis, broken legs, two broken vertebrae. Eight broken ribs, lacerated spleen, lacerated liver, varied vascular damage. Swelling of the brain. Cuts and bruises. Coma.”
“Not good.”
“Not good.”
If not for her deranging exhaustion and worry, the fact that James had a twin might have disturbed her. But in an odd way, it was comforting now. To have that face in the room. “Where did you come from?”
“New York City. I drove.”
“Oh, god,” she said. “Do you want a coffee or something?”
“No. I’m fine. I ate on the road and got a room near the hospital and showered. So I’m good for the day. But if you want to go home and rest or something, I could call you if anything changes.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.” She wrote it down. “Is there anyone else coming?”
“It’s just the two of us.”
She didn’t want to press him. She’d always known that Wingate had depths and secrets she knew nothing about. She hoped she’d have a chance to learn more about him. She realized, as she left the hospital and emerged into the dull morning light, that in the brief period of time he’d been with the detachment that she’d come to care for him a great deal. In fact, she realized, she loved him like a son. And then she sat behind her wheel and wept for him.
She showered and changed and went into work. The detachment was quiet. She entered through the rear door, but as soon as she was inside, she realized she had nowhere to go. The door to her office was closed and she heard voices within. She crossed the hallway and went into the kitchen to fix herself a cup of coffee. The Wiest bird – christened Willan, née Beedle – was still in its cage against the wall. They were going to have to call Cathy some time in the next few days and arrange to bring it back to her once she was comfortable enough to return home. She poured her coffee. It seemed the bird was getting used to everyone. It looked on her with a bored expression.
“I hear they named him a
fter me,” said a voice behind her. It was Commissioner Willan. “He seems pretty laid-back.”
“Maybe they chose the name because he deserves to be in a cage.”
“I’m happy to see you looking well, Hazel.”
“I only look well, Commissioner. I gather you’ve heard about DC Wingate?”
“I have,” he said.
“A lot of paperwork if someone dies in the line of duty, huh?”
He twitched his head to the side. “Not to mention the grief,” he said.
She had no response. This was not the day to discover that her surfer-dude commissioner also had a heart. “In any case, I’m well enough to give you and Inspector Greene a full report when you’re ready for one.”
“Superintendent Greene.”
“Right. Sorry. He abandons ship eight months ago, then goes and takes the exam, and now he’s back, crowned in glory.”
“Something like that. Can we live in peace?”
“What’s that?” Hazel said.
He smiled mildly at her. “You know the new regional HQ is going to be here, Detective Inspector. The province is going to put twenty million dollars into straightening out the 41. Port Dundas is going to get a bigger dot on the map.”
She lived among obliterators. “You straighten out the highway, Commissioner, traffic bypasses the town. You turn it into a backwater.”
“Not if at the new exit there’s a terrific new mall with stores people will visit, and the new Westmuir Police Headquarters is right there on the other side of it. Then you turn it into a gateway. The gateway,” he said, leaning forward with a finger raised, “of all of Westmuir. You’ll be top dick in the whole county.”
“After Ray.”
“Well, you can think of Ray however you like.”
There was no point in responding. Willan could carry on a conversation with himself at a dinner party. He was opening cupboards. He found some soup crackers and broke one in half for his namesake. The bird took it from him and then opened its beak and dropped it to the floor of the cage.
“I think he prefers seeds,” she said.
“If there were crackers in the wild, they’d never eat seeds again.” He brushed the crumbs off the front of his suit and held his arm out toward the hallway. “Shall we?”
] 37 [
Tuesday, August 16, late morning
The meeting took two hours. Howard Spere was present. Greene and Willan asked them to run down the entire investigation, from the discovery of Wiest’s body in the smoke shop’s parking lot to Spere’s report on the body they found in Carl Duffy’s house. The body was Duffy’s, and his relatives, trickling in from parts distant, were being briefed on the circumstances surrounding his death by Roland Forbes in one of the interview rooms.
The squad cars that had staked out the Eagle the night before had found it abandoned; Hazel remembered Bellecourt asking her where she thought Earl Tate had been. They’d now determined he’d been the one to drop the dynamite into the steel pipe. Then he’d vanished. Finally, Travers was lying on a metal bed in a drawer in the Mayfair General morgue. He’d died of his wounds, but the cause of death was Larysa. Hazel didn’t say that part, however, when it came her turn to speak.
Her superiors listened with interest, and occasionally one of them took notes. After an hour, they dismissed Spere but asked her to stay. Step by step, they walked through her decision process during the investigation and took more notes. Her erstwhile office began to take on the atmosphere of a courtroom, and she wondered now if her “promotion” and the respectful nature of their questioning tone wasn’t the framework for a gallows of some sort. But at the end of another hour, Willan thanked her and said, “That should do it.”
“Do what?”
“Complete our records.”
“Of what.”
Willan smiled. “You know, Hazel, there was a regime change in the middle of this case, some unusual tactics were used, some jurisdictional irregularities were noted, and there are five dead bodies, plus, as you tell it, an unknown number of other bodies that I presume will not be turning up anytime soon. Then, in the hospital in Mayfair, we have a member of your force clinging to life, and a woman who was kidnapped, sexually abused, and regularly assaulted, who needs to see her consul but who is currently in a state of shock. We have a store licensed by the province of Ontario to sell native cigarettes that was the portal to an illegal casino that in turn was intimately tied to the rape and torture of kidnap victims. And Ray here let you spend a lot of money. Oh, and did I mention that you kept a witness and possible suspect – you never ruled Cathy Wiest out, did you? –”
“Oh come on, now – ”
“But you didn’t and she lived in your home. With you.”
“Where is this heading, Commissioner? What’s it about?”
He stood up, and she remained where she was. She’d save standing up for when it would have the most effect. He said, “What it is not about, Inspector Micallef, is just you.”
“I know that.”
“What happens if this girl kills again?”
“She’s finished. She got everyone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“How. How can you be sure?” he asked. His tone had become ever so slightly heated and it was frankly disconcerting.
“If you had investigated this case, Commissioner Willan, you would have drawn the same conclusion.”
Silence.
“Am I fired?”
“What about future charges?”
“What future charges?”
“How many warrants were issued? Who was notified that a covert investigation out of our jurisdiction was being undertaken?”
“This was too serious to announce our intentions!”
“It was,” he said. “I agree.”
“We acted with the best information we had.”
“You’re right. I’m here to say you did a good job.”
“What?”
“Even though there is the matter of whether the man who shot Lydia Bellecourt also beat the crap out of her from inside his car, twenty feet away.”
She’d gotten to the point where it felt unwise to speak at all.
“Any of this could be a problem at some point, Hazel. If you need to be covered, I’ll cover you. And if there’s anything I don’t already know, I need to know it.”
He offered his hand. She screwed up her eyes and looked at Greene. He chucked his chin toward Willan. Shake the man’s bloody hand. She shook. Tentatively. He pumped.
“Thank you, Commissioner,” said Ray Greene because she hadn’t.
“Yes, thank you,” said Hazel.
“Do it again, though,” he said to both of them, “and it won’t be difficult to fire either of you. Or suspend you without pay, definitely or indefinitely, retire you, reassign you to deskwork, send you on a teaching mission to Kapuskasing. My options are actually almost endless. Superintendent?” Greene stood. “You’re her boss now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Inspector?” Hazel tightened her chest. “Ray Greene is your boss. Everything you do from now on is hand-stamped, green-lighted, and approved, and not just in principle, by Superintendent Greene. Is that unambiguous enough for you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when James Wingate gets out of hospital, we’ll have a party for him and give him a commendation in front of the whole town. When he gets out.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and this time, when he offered his hand, she took it.
He left them together in the office. Greene sat.
“That was interesting,” he said.
She couldn’t think of what to say. “I better get started on my reports.”
“Good,” he said.
“Is Cathy still at – ”
“She went home last night. Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe. Not right away, though. I don’t know what to –”
He was writing something. She strained to see
what it was. He was making figure eights with the tip of his pen.
“Can I go?”
“I’ll be at the hospital this afternoon.”
“I’ll see you there then.”
That was the extent of it for now.
______
After trying to write her report, Hazel went back to the house in Pember Lake. It was mid-afternoon. There were a lot of loose ends now; matters she’d left unattended. There were some plates in the sink and she washed them. She flashed on her memory of Cathy standing at her own sink, washing her entire house with that look in her eye. She thought she knew now what Cathy had been feeling. Like the world was floating away. She noticed her mother’s pill organizer still had its morning doses in it. Emily was upstairs taking a nap. A little wave of anger suddenly went through her.
She took a glass of water and the pills up the stairs, with a plate of Coffee Breaks, and went into her mother’s room. She was asleep with her face turned to the wall. The covers were pulled up to her ears and the sheet barely moved with her breathing. Hazel turned on the bedside lamp, but the sudden little flood of light had no effect on her mother’s wakefulness. A jolt of fear went through her and Hazel reached out and touched her mother’s shoulder and shook her lightly. The shoulder was warm, and her mother shuddered beneath her touch and said something, and Hazel shook her a little more.
“It’s okay. It’s just me. Can you sit up?”
Her mother inhaled deeply through her nostrils and sat up, blinking and confused. “What time is it?”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m sorry I woke you. You forgot to take your pills.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” her mother said, fully awake now. “I’m not going to die in my sleep for lack of pills.”
“You don’t know that. Now sit up and take them.” Emily pushed herself up farther in the bed and held out her hand angrily for the medications. Hazel lay them in her cool, leathery, white palm. “I know you’re not pleased with this situation, but this is the way things are. Take these pills, and take all your pills, and eat food, and stop acting like you have a date with the Grim Reaper. You never gave up a fight in your life, Mother, and you’re not starting now.” Her mother swallowed the pills without the water and then held her hand out for the glass because they wouldn’t go down. “Jesus Christ,” Hazel said.
A Door in the River Page 24
