Читать книгу Charlie McKelvey Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - C.B. Forrest - Страница 20

Back at the office, Green pulled out the chart that Captain Ulrich had sent him of the military chain of command. If the military functioned like the police, loyalty was built from the ground up, starting with your partner and your squad. The section was the basic unit in the army. There were eight other members in the section, all of whom lived together more closely than any family did, packed like sardines into armoured personnel carriers and spending long hours together on patrol. If a breach of military law had been committed, this is probably where it would have occurred, and these are the boys who would have seen it. But who else might have known?

Sections worked closely together as a platoon, under the day to day direction of the platoon commander. Richard Hamm. There were other NCO s attached to the platoon, but all of these appeared to be more closely allied to platoon headquarters under Hamm than to the sections. There were ranking officers higher than Hamm, of course, but these would be even more removed from the frontline actions and daily lives of the individual soldiers. Hamm was the only ranking officer likely to know of their wrongdoing and capable of suppressing that knowledge.

And Hamm had been surprisingly unsupportive of Ian MacDonald’s recommendation for a medal.

But if a war crime had been committed or covered up, Green was not going to get at it by going head to head with Hamm. Hamm would never admit a thing unless his back was truly to the wall. To accomplish that, Green needed ammunition. He needed to find a lowly section member who wouldn’t see the harm in revealing the truth ten years after the fact, or who might be relieved at the chance to be rid of the guilt.

He yanked open his office door and caught sight of Gibbs, who was back from the hospital and deep in conversation on the phone. Green paced as he listened to Gibbs’s end of the conversation.

“Thanks for trying, Karl. I appreciate your position,” Gibbs said, hanging up with a sigh.

“Karl? As in Captain Karl Ulrich?”

A ghost of a smile flitted across Gibbs’s weary face. “We’re old friends by now. He gave me some deep background on Colonel Hamm.” Gibbs glanced down at his notes. “He’s fourth generation military. His father was a decorated Korean war hero, and his grandfather was an infantry platoon commander who died at the Somme and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his solo stand against the enemy. It saved most of his platoon. Quite an impressive family, sir.”

Green nodded thoughtfully. No wonder Hamm had not been supportive of MacDonald’s medal; he was used to heroism on a far grander scale. But the information added new clarity to the picture that was beginning to emerge. Hamm would have grown up with these family tales of heroism and sacrifice. How powerful would be his commitment to the military he loved, and how far would he be willing to go to protect it? Far enough for a cover-up? Far enough for murder?

“Sir?”

Green pulled himself from his racing thoughts.

“I’m running into brick walls on John Blakeley,” Gibbs was saying. “His file is shut tight as a clam, except what they give out to the media.”

Green nodded grimly, not surprised that the military’s open access had slammed shut when it reached one of its gilded sons. “I guess nobody in the military wants to give the media or the opposition any ammunition to use against him.”

“Even the details about his wife and his children are confidential, sir. All I could find out is he has three grown children and a wife named Leanne.”

“Wouldn’t want the truth interfering with a good spin. He probably had a really ugly divorce, and the children hate him.” Green sighed. He wasn’t sure how Blakeley fit into his conspiracy theory anyway. Although he had served on peacekeeping missions, his name wasn’t listed anywhere on the chain of command from MacDonald’s section to the whole battalion.

“Okay, we’ll keep chipping away,” he said. “But I’ve got something else for you to do right now. I’d like you to track down that corporal from Oliver’s section who’s studying at Queens. I want him brought up here for questioning first thing in the morning.” He turned to go, then belatedly he remembered Gibbs’s visit to the hospital. Judging from his long face, the news wasn’t good.

“How is Sue?” he asked gently.

“Alive. They did another brain scan, and there’s some recovery. I suppose that’s good news. I just want...I just want her to open her eyes and tell us who did this, so it will all be over.” Green thought of Peters lying so still and helpless in the bed. She would hate this and would be the first person wanting to nail the bastard to the wall. If only she could. But with any luck, by the time she did open her eyes, they would have some justice for her. At the very least, they would know what had happened between the soldiers in Croatia, which would be one small step in unravelling the mystery.

In the meantime, he had to stop Sullivan from questioning Hamm until they had some concrete facts to back up Green’s theory. If Hamm was the mastermind of a war crimes coverup and the killer of Oliver and Ross, Green wanted all the ammunition he could muster before going after him. As he punched in Sullivan’s cellphone number, he hoped he wasn’t already too late. Hamm was one of the key witnesses Sullivan had gone to see, and he was probably in the middle of the interview right now, armed with fewer than half the facts he needed to make the colonel sweat.

Sullivan’s cheerful voice came through after the third ring. “No problem,” he said when Green told him to forget Hamm for now. “He’s not even here. Got called down to Ottawa this morning for some meeting. He’s slumming it at the Chateau Laurier, so we can catch him tomorrow. Anything else you want us to do before we head back home?”

“You could drop by the OPP to check on the progress of the Peters investigation.”

Sullivan chuckled. “Already done that. They haven’t made much headway, but they did uncover a couple of interesting things. You want to hear them?”

Green rolled his eyes. Sullivan had always been a tease, particularly when he knew Green was hot on the scent. Never had the teasing felt so good. “You want to direct traffic, putz?”

Sullivan laughed. “First, the OPP turned up an old ex-army sergeant who says he was talking to Peters in the King’s Arms bar when she received the mysterious phone call. He claims he told her Patricia Ross had been asking questions in the same bar the week before.”

“He seems to be keeping a bar stool warm at the King’s Arms. Questions about what?”

“About the campaign, the people behind it, that sort of thing. He was a bit fuzzy. He apparently told Patricia Ross he didn’t know much except that Blakeley was some military hotshot who believed in a new approach to peacekeeping. Which the sergeant apparently agreed with.”

So, thought Green with a surge of satisfaction, we’re on the right track with this military angle. After Patricia Ross returned to Ottawa, she’d embarked on the next step in her quest, a date with a mystery man. Shortly after which, she was dead.

“What’s the other interesting thing?”

“Remember the phone call the bartender says he received from someone claiming to be Peters’ partner? Well, turns out he did receive a call at approximately the right time, which came from a local cellphone.”

Green sucked in his breath. “Did you trace it?”

“Dead end. It’s a new line registered to a company called BA Securities, but its owner is well buried. The credit card is a numbered account.”

“Did the OPP request the phone’s logs?”

“Yeah, they know a thing or two about investigation up here, Green.”

Green ignored the bait. “Have you got the phone number? I’ll give it to our tech guys.”

It was a local 613 area code and as Green scribbled it down, he thought it looked familiar. After signing off, he scrolled through the reports Gibbs and the other officers had entered on Patricia Ross’s activities until he found the record of calls made to the payphone in the lobby of her Vanier hotel during the week before her death. Detectives had traced all the numbers, including one made by a cellphone with a 613 area code just the day before her death. Detectives had been unable to track down either the owner’s name or the address, but the cellphone was registered to a BA Securities.

Bingo. The dots were connecting.

But what the hell did they form? And what, after days of intensive search and tons of shoe leather, did they really know for sure? He had a few suspicious names, a hint of conspiracy and cover-up, but the theory holding it all together was as flimsy and insubstantial as ever. Not one witness had seen Patricia Ross sharing a drink the night of her death. Not one witness had seen a suspicious man leaving the scene of Peters’ assault. Not a single fingerprint or shoe impression had been found to tie the killer to either attack. And as for motives, the speculation about war crimes was about as improbable as blue moons.

He sat behind his desk, staring at the little piles of notes and messages that were scattered about in disarray. Had he missed something? All the crucial reports pertinent to the investigation were on computer, in a properly organized and managed case file. Yet maybe he had forgotten a little aside, not knowing its significance at the time.

He began moving the notes around, rearranging piles and discarding irrelevant notes. Suddenly at the edge of a pile, half hidden by his phone, he spotted a note he’d never seen before. It was a scrawl on a phone message slip.

“A friend called, said to tell ‘Mr. G’ to meet her at her art gallery at sunset.”

Green stared at the message in disbelief. It was dated April 28 at four o’clock. Yesterday. “Jesus Christ!” He slammed out of his office, prepared to demand which incompetent idiot had taken it, when he realized that just after four o’clock yesterday, Weiss had called in Sue Peters’ attack, and everything else had gone out the window. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Mollified, he glanced outside and saw the late afternoon sun slanting off the windshields of the cars crawling west along the Queensway. He was a day too late, but maybe Twiggy was the patient type. If she had something to tell him, she might keep going back to the aqueduct until he turned up.

* * *

Some day at end of July, 1993. Maslenica Bridge, Sector South.

Our section just had our first night at the OP , sitting up on the top of this hill. Man, was it freaky! We’re supposed to be watching this bridge to count and identify each vehicle thatcrosses. Now this is not a real bridge, because the Serbs blewthat up when the Croats invaded, so now it’s just a pontoonbridge that the Serbs lob artillery at all the time. We canhardly see it with binoculars, let alone ID the vehicle type.

Anyway, there are Serbs in the hills behind us and Croatsin the valley below, and they’re firing away at each other andthe shells are whizzing right over our heads. Multiple rocketlaunchers. Whup, whup, whup when they launch. Kaboom,kaboom, kaboom a few seconds later when they land. Andwe’re going Holy Shit! And Sarge is on the radio, screaming tothe Hammer, and the Hammer’s screaming to the OC , who’sdown on the beach, to get us out of here. It’s a miracle we allsurvived. On the way down, the mountain was littered withcorpses. You couldn’t even tell which side they were on, becausethey had no uniforms. We had to bag them and bring themdown. I can still smell the stink on me.

* * *

It was past seven o’clock, and the last rays of sunlight burnished the tree tops as Green headed west along Albert Street towards the aqueduct. The police tape had been removed from the crime scene, and every single piece of trash had been picked up by the Ident officers, leaving the little hideaway unnaturally pristine. The wall paintings glinted bold red and blue in the sun, but the place was empty. Not even the stoned teens or wasted drunks had returned, as if Patricia’s death still hung like a pall overhead.

Green searched for telltale signs of Twiggy’s presence, but her garbage bag and her tattered pile of newspaper were nowhere to be seen. His shouts went unanswered. He climbed back into his car and tried to remember where she hung out. In the early days of her exile, she’d sometimes gone to the women’s shelters or the “Y”, but she’d resented their attempts to fix her life and preferred to take her chances on the open streets. She said shelters were for people who were trying to put their lives together. She had none left to put together.

Nonetheless, he phoned around. The women’s shelters had not seen her, nor had the food bank or drop-in centres. With a growing sense of unease, he phoned the hospitals. It took a lot of wheedling and pulling rank, but eventually he got his answer. None of the hospitals had admitted a street woman fitting her description. It was small comfort that, had she turned up at the morgue, he would already have been informed.

The sun was just below the horizon and the streets were sinking into shadow when he remembered her reference to the Tim Hortons on Bank Street. The manager there gave her coffee, she said, better than anything the police had on offer.

Starting the car, he shoved it into gear and shot out of the parking lot through the traffic. He raced back towards downtown, did an illegal left turn onto Bank Street and parked in front of the modest coffee shop tucked between a magazine store and a shwarma take-out. The closed sign was up, but he could see someone sweeping inside. He hammered on the door and plastered his badge against the glass. The man’s scowl turned to consternation as he hustled forward to unlock the door. He had a Middle Eastern complexion with a heavy five o’clock shadow and the most mournful black eyes Green had ever seen.

“I was just closing,” he said without a trace of an accent. “Is there a problem?”

“Do you know a fat woman named Twiggy? She comes to your store for coffee.”

“Yes.” The man’s eyes slitted warily. “Why? Is that a problem?” Why did the man assume a police officer always meant trouble? Even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. The world had changed for this man since September 11.

Green found himself apologizing. “I’m sorry. No problem, I’m just concerned. She’s a witness, and I’m trying to locate her.” Belatedly he offered his hand. “I’m Inspector Michael Green.”

The man stared at Green’s hand, then reached forward to take it cautiously in his. When Green didn’t bite, he seemed to relax. “Hassim Mohammed. And I haven’t seen her today. I’ve been worried, because she’s not a very healthy woman.”

Green recorded his name and address. “When did you last see her?”

“Two days ago? Thursday. She came for her coffee, then went off. She said she had a call to make. But there was a—” Alarm widened his melancholy eyes. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“I told her about a man who was asking about her. She asked me a whole lot of questions about him—like what name he called her—and I know she didn’t want him to find her.”

The first fingers of fear brushed Green’s spine. “Can you describe this man?”

“Dark business suit, Canadian.” He paused. “I mean white. He was wearing sunglasses, he had blond hair.

“Height and weight?”

“Taller than you. Maybe six feet. Well built but not heavy. One-eighty?”

“Age?” The man scrunched up his face and blew air into his cheeks.

“Thirties? Maybe more. It’s hard to tell with the sunglasses.”

Green probed with a few more questions, but the description did not improve. As it stood, it was too generic to be of much help and could apply to several of the men in the case. He suppressed his frustration with an effort.

“What questions did this man ask you?”

“Did I know her, where she usually stayed, when was she coming to my place again.”

“And what name did he call her?”

“None. He just called her the fat woman.” Hassim’s eyes had been growing larger with each question. “Is she all right? Has something happened to her?”

“At this point I just want to locate her.” Green held out his card. “If she shows up, or you remember anything else, call me at that number. And I’d like you to come down to the station tomorrow to work with our police artist. We’ll see if we can work up a sketch.”

“Oh!” Hassim’s eyes darted anxiously. “Well, the store...”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Mohammed. It won’t take long, and it might help us find Twiggy.”

He sighed with resignation as he took the card. “She was my teacher,you know. Grade Seven. But I don’t think she remembers me.”

Oh, I’m sure she does, Green thought grimly. A profound wave of sadness and anxiety swept through him. But for Twiggy, that teacher doesn’t exist any more.