Every Breath You Take

by Jay Zendrowski

  *

  FOUR WEEKS LATER

  May gave way to June, and the warm sun beat down on London, the trees and flowers fully in bloom-the Forest City once more worthy of its name. Pepper and Wallace sat across from each other in the squad room, having their morning coffee. They both turned as the door opened and Chin walked in, looking sharp in a tailored pearl-grey pant suit.

  "Hey Chin," Pepper said as she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked over to join them, "congratulations on the promotion-you're playing with the big boys now."

  "Does that mean we have to teach her the secret handshake?" said Wallace. He and Pepper went through an elaborate gesticulation which ended with both of them fluttering their hands skyward, like awkward ducks rising from a pond.

  "No thanks," Chin said. "Being in a club with a couple of knuckleheads like you two isn't something I signed up for."

  "Has Caruso told you who your new partner's going to be?" Wallace asked.

  "No. All I know is that he's interviewing people. I have no idea if it's going to be a newbie, or a geezer like you guys."

  "Geezer?" Pepper said, opening his eyes wide in astonishment.

  "Well hey, you did let McTavish get the drop on you. That's something Bruce Lee never would have let happen. He would have heard that guy sneaking up on him. Maybe you forgot your hearing aid that night."

  "Listen, Chin, who was it that made that beautiful leg sweep and set you on your ass that time?"

  Chin turned to Wallace. "He's never going to stop pulling that one out of the bucket, is he?" Wallace just shook his head in return.

  "It wasn't a fluke, Chin, I'm telling you. Tomorrow, six a.m. in the gym. Are you going to be there, or do I need to call Colonel Sanders to come and pick up this week's supply of chicken?"

  "Oh, I'll be there. But before you go shooting your mouth off, you might want to call your lawyer and draw up a will. It's not going to be pretty-I can tell you that right now."

  "Speaking of lawyers," Wallace said, "what's the latest on the lawsuit that Drummond filed against the department?"

  "The Inspector was telling me yesterday that Drummond's lawyer convinced him to drop the suit in exchange for the department choosing not to prosecute him for having a grow-op in his house." Chin paused as the other two nodded. "Have you two heard how McTavish is doing?"

  Ever since the incident on Huron Street, Chin had never called her former partner by his first name-not once. "He's being held at the jail on Exeter Road awaiting his trial," Pepper said. "I think it's next month at this point. But who knows how long it will take with the way lawyers work. We've heard that the gunshot wound in his shoulder is healing okay, but that bleach is going to leave scars. Lucky for him you splashed that water on his face in time-the people we talked to in the hospital said he came close to losing his sight."

  Chin nodded slowly before looking up at them. "You know, sometimes I think I should have just let that fucker burn." She paused as Pepper and Wallace remained quiet. "I wish I knew what happened to him. He could be a real prick sometimes, but I never saw anything like that coming. I could tell he was always jealous of you, Tee. The way you were with your family, the way you get along with everybody in the office. I could see how it pissed him off sometimes, but he never once mentioned anything about that Vicky girl."

  "To tell you the truth, I'd almost forgotten about her after all these years. We only dated a few times, and I liked her, but like I told Ian, it was nothing more than that. I had no idea he was so obsessed with her. You saw that wall full of that same picture, over and over again-pretty scary. No wonder she broke up with him. She told me he was 'clingy', but obviously she had no idea what he was capable of."

  "Neither did we," Wallace said as he looked at Pepper. "That hate for you must have been building over the years. It probably got worse after his wife left him. The crown attorney told me he spoke with McTavish's wife. It was like he told you, Tee. She said he wanted to have rough sex and she fought him off that night, scratching his face and neck in a few places before she pushed him off and got out of there. She left town and told him to send her stuff to her or she'd go to the cops. Those scratches she gave him are why he took that leave of absence right away."

  "He never talked about her," Chin said. "I asked a couple of times, but he always put me off. I could tell it bugged him so I stopped asking early on."

  "I think once he discovered that website, and finding out there were other people like him was what sent him over the edge," Wallace continued. "He'd had a taste of it with Vicky, and he wanted it again. Leaving those notes with the song lyrics was pretty clever on his part. He wanted us to get the case so he could watch us try to catch him. He wanted to show us how much smarter than us he was."

  "Rupe, tell Elizabeth what you were telling me about the song lyrics."

  "Oh yeah. I looked back at the messages he left on those notes. In hindsight it seems so obvious that he was directing the words right at Tee. Like from the first one: 'Who broke my heart? You did you did.' And then, 'You think you're smart. Stupid, stupid.' That one on its own was showing us how much he hated Tee. The second one from Whip It was like he was telling us to look under our very nose: 'Get straight, go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it's not too late.' And the third one was even more obvious: 'Strange but not a stranger, I'm an ordinary guy, burning down the house.' We totally missed that line 'strange but not a stranger'. It was like he was telling us we knew him."

  "Don't forget about that note he left us in the perfume bottle," Pepper said.

  "Oh yeah, from Message in a Bottle. It was almost like he wanted to tell us who he was: 'More loneliness, any man could bear, rescue me before I fall into despair, I'll send an SOS to the world'."

  "Do you think he really wanted to get caught?" Chin asked.

  "I think subconsciously he did, otherwise he wouldn't have picked those lyrics," Pepper said. "I'm sure to a certain extent he thought he was invincible and would never be caught, but I think the cop side of him knew it was inevitable. Once he started to slip up and we found that invoice with the printing and Mrs. Hooper gave us the partial plate, he started to panic. He knew we were closing in on him, especially when Tanya said she thought she might get that print to work. If she ran it through the whole system, Ian's prints on file would have popped. That's why he took Shauna. He wanted to get at me right away."

  "I think you're right. He had to do it then," Chin said, slowly shaking her head from side to side. "Like I said, I never saw this side of him at all. I keep asking myself if there was something I missed, something I should have seen or heard when he talked to me."

  "Don't beat yourself up about it. None of us saw this coming," Pepper said before nodding towards Wallace. "If he hadn't sent that message with the Gordon Sumner/Gordon Summers screw up, we might have never caught him. And me and Shauna likely both wouldn't be here."

  "When his first message came through that he had you, it started nagging at me right away that only the people on the team knew I was the one carrying the phone. When he sent the second message, yes, the Gordon Summers mistake made me think right away of how he'd screwed it up in the office. And then I couldn't ever remember him being in the room when any of the messages had come in. When I ran his licence plate and found that Mrs. Hooper had been one letter off, I was sure it was him. But seeing the imprint of the shoe and comparing it to same ones I had clinched it. It all fit-it had to be him."

  "Rupe, you were mentioning about seeing things in hindsight. When I was driving to his house that night, I thought about all those pins I'd stuck in the map with the locations of all the things that had happened in the case. I realized then that his house was right in the middle of it all."

  "I think we got so focussed on Drummond that we forgot to look right in front of our noses," Wallace said.

  "He must have loved it when we found out about Drummond being at that party."

  "Yeah, that's what he told me," Pepper said. "It was pure coincidence that
we had the perfect suspect in the right place at the right time. Ian must have loved watching us chase our tails when we kept pounding away at Drummond when we thought he was The Sandman."

  They all nodded in agreement before Chin spoke. "How's Shauna doing?"

  "She's good. It took her a while to wrap her head around everything, but she seems to be doing okay. My mother and grandmother are doting over her like you wouldn't believe, and I think she'll be all right."

  "How do you think she's feeling now about dating a cop?"

  That was the same question Pepper had been asking himself every day lately. He gave Chin the same answer he gave himself. "I know it sounds pretty clich?, but I think we have to just take it one day at a time. I try to understand what she's going through, but I?I just don't know."

  Chin nodded in understanding, as did Wallace. "She's good for you, Tee," Chin said. "I like her. I like her a lot, and not just for who she is on her own, but because she makes you a better man. Do whatever you need to do to keep this woman."

  As Pepper nodded thoughtfully, Inspector Caruso's voice rang out as he poked his head out of his office. "Pepper, Wallace, I thought you two were supposed to be on your way to see that guy in Byron? What are you still doing here?"

  "We're on our way, sir," Wallace said as they grabbed their coats.

  "Chin, come in here," Caruso continued. "I want to talk to you about some of these people I've been interviewing."

  "Yes sir."

  *

  A few minutes later, Pepper pulled the car out of the underground parking lot and headed towards the suburb of Byron. He and Wallace had to talk to a realtor about an insurance scam the guy said he'd discovered. They had the car windows open as the sun beat down on them. The city felt alive and vibrant after the long winter months.

  "So how's Little Tee doing these days?" Pepper said, asking about the baby boy Michelle Wallace had given birth to a couple of weeks previously.

  "His name is Scot, got it? I don't want to hear any of this Tee business," Wallace replied.

  "We'll see, we'll see," Pepper said as he wheeled the car onto Commissioners Road. "Hey, I think I taught him something already."

  "Taught him something already? What are you talking about? All he does is eat, sleep, and poop."

  "So he takes after his father-I can't help that. But seriously, when I was looking at him in his crib the other day, I reached in and he gave me a fist bump." Pepper reached to the side and extended his fist in Wallace's direction. "He raised his little fist and bumped it right up against mine."

  "I'll believe that when I see it."

  They drove in silence for a couple of minutes, Pepper thinking about everything that had happened. He looked over at his partner. "Rupe, you did good. Thank you."

  "You too, buddy. You too."

  As they crossed Wonderland Road and continued west, Wallace turned towards Pepper, "Okay, favourite song by The Pretenders-and it can't be 'Back on the Chain Gang'."

  Pepper laughed, reaching across and giving his partner one more fist bump.

  THE END