Читать книгу Charlie McKelvey Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - C.B. Forrest - Страница 8

April 6, 1993. Zagreb, Croatia.

Dear Kit... We’re in the airport waiting for our ground transport, so this is my first glimpse of the country. Zagreb airport looks like any other modern airport. I don’t know what I was expecting—snipers, tanks and big craters in the ground from mortar fire. But there’s nothing but wall to wall peacekeepers in the pouring rain. It’s wet and cold, but everybody’s excited.

April 10, 1993. Pakrac, Sector West, Croatia.

We’re at our position now and getting dug in. Our section house is a bombed out farmhouse in the middle of a field. There’s mud everywhere from the winter rains. We’re all pitching in, learning the jobs from the 3 Pats who are leaving. Today I did six hours at the hot dog stand. That’s what they call a checkpoint. It can be boring, you sit there and search each vehicle that comes through, write down the licence plate, who’s in it and where they’re going. Sector West is a UN protected area with a Serb side and a Croat side, and the ceasefire line in between runs right through the Canadian Battalion’s area of responsibility. The CO says they put the Canadians in the toughest spot because we’re the only UN peacekeeping battalion that has the equipment and the training to do the job.

Anyway, there aren’t supposed to be any weapons inside the UNPA, but both sides are always trying to sneak them in, and it’s our job to stop them. Sometimes we have a translator but a lot of times we just use hand gestures and it can get pretty funny. Us pointing go back and them pointing forward. There’s a Muslim kid Mahir from the nearby village who knows some English, so we use him when he’s free.

April 15 1993, Sector West, Croatia.

Dear Kit... The past couple of days we’ve noticed this dog hanging around the woods near the hot dog stand. She looks like a border collie and shepherd mix with sores on her legs and her ribs sticking out. Mahir says she belonged to a Serbian family who abandoned their farm. She was so spooked it took us three days to coax her to come near. Today we got her in the APC and took her back to the section house, and tomorrow we’ll build her a dog house. She’ll probably end up sleeping with us, but Sarge says when the Hammer’s around, she’d better stay in her kennel. Rules are rules, after all. I’m looking for a good name for her.

May 1, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.

Good things and not so good. Our dog’s been gaining weight steadily and the platoon medic treated her sores with antibiotics. Sarge swore him to secrecy. I swear she’s the smartest animal I’ve ever met. She knows about fifty English words already, more than the Croatian kids we’re trying to teach. I’ve named her Fundy. The guys tease me about my new girlfriend, but I don’t mind. She’s no competition for you, but she reminds me of home.

Today our section did patrol, which is more interesting than the hot dog stand. We drove all around the countryside in the APC checking for weapons caches and looking for troop movement. The countryside’s green and beautiful, but a lot of the villages are destroyed, and hardly anyone lives there any more. Everything is bombed to hell. One of the patrols came across this Serb village where there were no people, just stuff left on the ground, like sneakers and kids’ clothes. Word is there’s a mass grave there, but we’ll never know. Kind of creepy, that only half a klic away, everyone’s just carrying on.

* * *

After Gibbs had sent his priority request to Halifax earlier that day, Green dispatched him to meet up with Peters at the train station. Peters had proved that she had more detective instincts than Green had initially thought, but he didn’t trust her not to get carried away when those instincts took her on the hunt. He recognized the danger signs of over-exuberance bordering on obsession, because he’d been there.

Besides, if she was going to go poking around in the lowcost accommodation facilities in Vanier, she’d better not go alone. Vanier had proud, francophone working class roots, but like many inner city neighbourhoods, it was now an uneasy mix of immigrants, transients, drug addicts and the working poor. Crack houses stood side by side with the modest woodframe cottages of the founding families.

Green himself spent the rest of the day managing the developments in the Byward Club investigation, which was fast deteriorating into a circus of lying teenage brats, irate parents, and their threatening lawyers. Fortunately, they kept Barbara Devine so busy that she had little time to agitate about the murder of an unknown, unlamented Jane Doe. Not even the women’s groups seemed interested in taking up the cause.

By five o’clock, Green’s patience was expired, his head ached, and he knew he still faced several more hours of diplomacy and hard work once he got home. He was just returning to his office from his third lawyer meeting when Gibbs and Peters came off the elevator from the basement car park. Gibbs moved at a purposeful lope, and Peters had to hustle to keep pace. Spotting Green, they changed course to intercept him.

“Let’s get a coffee,” Green said, steering them towards the stairs to the police cafeteria, although they both looked as if they’d already overdosed on adrenaline. Green bought them coffee and muffins before sitting down opposite to listen. They sat side by side, he noticed, looking very comfortable with each other.

“Any news from Halifax?” Peters asked as she added three packages of sugar to her coffee.

Green shook his head. “Did you have any luck with the porter at the train station?”

Gibbs nodded proudly. “Sue hit the jackpot on that one. Y-you tell it, Sue.”

She clasped her hands and leaned forward on the table, her coffee forgotten. “Marier Street. That’s the street our Jane Doe was looking for. So we drove down there and canvassed every house and building on the whole street. We found her at #296. It calls itself a motel, and it’s one of those long, twostorey 1950s buildings where the clients either stay an hour or a week. She’d booked in for a week on April 11th, and she paid another week on the 18th.”

“How did she pay?”

“Cash. And she registered under Patti Oliver from Sydney, Nova Scotia. There are two Olivers listed in Sydney, but neither of them have ever heard of a Patti.”

“We c-could find no such person listed anywhere in Nova Scotia,” Gibbs added. “Although we’ve still got some calls to make.”

“Did she at least provide the motel with a phone number or a contact name?”

Gibbs shook his head, but before he could untangle his tongue, Peters jumped back in. “Cash, no questions asked, works fine for these guys. But we got the motel manager’s permission to search the room. We found the duffel bag the porter told me about, mostly full of clothes and food. There was food on the dresser—bread, juice, tea, canned soups and beans—low-cost stuff. Everything was healthy, and her clothing was mostly clean, even if it was old. It looked like she tried to take care of herself and watch her money.”

Green was again pleasantly surprised by her perceptiveness. “Any scotch?”

“No, she must have bought that at a bar.”

“Or someone bought it for her. Any clues to suggest who she was or why she was here?”

Peters glanced over at Gibbs as if in silent invitation, which he accepted. “Just one small thing, sir.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed over an evidence bag. Through the transparent plastic, Green could make out a small leather box. Slipping on latex gloves, he opened the box. Nestled inside was an embossed silver disk attached to a red and blue striped ribbon. On the front was a maple leaf inside a wreath, and on the back were engraved the words “Bravery—Bravoire”.

“There’s a little card underneath, sir,” Peters burst in, unable to contain herself. She plucked the card out and began to read. “This Medal of Bravery is awarded to Corporal Ian MacDonald for acts of outstanding heroism in hazardous circumstances, September 10, 1993.”

“Ian MacDonald. Have you checked this out?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “It was awarded on a peacekeeping mission in Croatia, where he was serving with the Second Battalion of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Regiment.”

Green saw the suspense in their eyes as they waited for him to digest that information and to ask the obvious question. “So did you track down this Ian MacDonald?”

“Well, that’s the thing, sir,” said Gibbs, so excited he didn’t even stutter. “Corporal Ian MacDonald died September 10, 1995, and we can’t get anyone in the military to talk to us.”

* * *

It was now past six o’clock, and Green was unable to rouse anyone official at DND . He left an urgent message on Captain Ulrich’s voice mail to phone him the instant he got the message. Then he turned his attention back to the two detectives, who had followed him hopefully back to his office. Both were beginning to sag as the adrenaline wore off. Peters, he recalled, had now been on the job at least twelve hours.

“Okay, good work, you two. Assign the follow-up work to someone on the night shift. Let them try to locate Patricia Oliver and Ian MacDonald through the various databases. You can pick it up again in the morning.”

After the two detectives had walked back to the elevator together, Green glanced at his watch and cursed. Sharon was working the evening shift again, which meant that Hannah had been in charge of the household for three hours now. Dinner was going to be very late, even if he picked up something easy from the Bagelshop again on his way home, and Tony would be apoplectic with hunger.

He locked his drawer, logged off his computer, and was just grabbing his jacket when his phone rang. He considered letting it go to voice mail, but thought it might be Captain Ulrich.

Instead, a familiar, manic voice came through the line over the background of chatter and office machines. “Mike!” The man hailed him like a long lost friend. “Glad I caught you. These murders are keeping us both hopping.”

Green muttered a soft oath. This is what voice mail was for—to intercept unwanted calls from the press at the worst possible moments. Frank Corelli was the crime reporter for the Ottawa Sun and, as crime reporters go, he was smart and reliable. They’d known each other for four years and had helped each other out when Green needed a certain spin put out on a case and Frank needed a story. But no publicity was going to be good publicity in the Byward murders.

So he dusted off the classic departmental evasion. “Frank, you know I can’t comment on the Byward case at this time. Superintendent Devine has scheduled a press conference for—”

“I know, I know. And I’ll be there, duly copying down the party line. But this is the other case, and I’ve got something for you for a change.”

Green perked up. “The aqueduct case?”

“The very one. Now you know I always play straight with you guys. You don’t want something reported, I keep it under wraps. I learn something, I pass it on. Right?”

“Frank, spit it out.”

There was a pause, during which Green could hear a phone ringing. “I got a call from a woman. She wouldn’t give her name, just said she knew who killed the prostitute in the aqueduct, and was I interested. I played dumb, what do you mean am I interested? Well, she says, how much is it worth? Nothing, I said, that’s obstructing a police investigation. You call in the cops, she says, and I’ll take it to the competition. I says nobody will touch it, and she says you got no imagination. Anyway, I thought you should know you got information out there somewhere.”

“Or maybe not.” Whenever a major crime occurred in the city, the wackos and the wheeler dealers came out of the woodwork.

“Maybe not, but she sounded like she was holding some good cards. Not a wingnut, clear, calm, seemed intelligent. She knew the body had been moved after death. That true?”

Green said nothing. Inwardly, his thoughts raced over the scene at the aqueduct. How many people knew that detail, which had been held back from all press reports. He tried to sound disinterested. “So what did you tell her?”

Frank chuckled knowingly. “I told her to give me a day to set it up and to call me back. She wasn’t happy about that, but I told her I had to get the money approved. We gotta figure out how you want to play this.”

“Did you record the phone number?”

Corelli read it out, and Green put him on hold while he logged back onto his computer and searched the phone number database. His momentary excitement faded. The call had come from a payphone on Bank Street near Wellington, which was the major intersection almost opposite Parliament Hill. Thousands of people, tourists and government workers alike, passed by it every day. Green weighed his options.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do. When she calls back, set up a meeting to see what she’s got. I’ll have someone nearby, and we’ll pick her up.”

When Green finally escaped the office, his spirits were greatly buoyed and his headache gone. The case was breaking open, with new leads unfolding in all directions. He held fast to his good mood throughout yet another hectic evening as sole cook, babysitter and dog walker, and poured himself a well-deserved shot of single malt as he settled down to the eleven o’clock news. Only as he sat through the usual stories of global carnage and the endless spats on the federal campaign trail did his mood begin to sag.

Politics. It was a game too often won by opportunists and manipulators, who mouthed platitudes about the public good, but whose real passion was power. The Liberal Party, having been ousted from power after years of corruption, was pulling out all the stops to reverse the Conservative backlash. Highprofile candidates for both parties were being bribed with promises of cabinet posts and plum appointments. Jubilant reporters were crisscrossing the country, stoking the flames of division in key ridings where election races were most heated. The real losers, Green thought, were the genuine good guy candidates who wanted to make a difference for their country. And the country itself.

It was no different in policing, where, once in the public spotlight, who you knew and how well you could play the game were often more important than what was right. A victory of form over substance. And we have only ourselves to blame, Green thought as he groped sleepily for the remote to shut off the latest Conservative rant. Because people like him refused even to get in the game.

Unexpectedly, the phone rang, sending a spike of fear and excitement racing through him. At this hour, a phone call almost always meant trouble.

“Inspector Green?” It was a woman’s voice, curt and authoritative. “This is Sergeant McGrath of the Halifax Regional Police. Sorry to disturb you at home, but the detective down at your headquarters insisted you’d want to be informed.”

Green bolted upright, wide awake and rooting on the side table for a pen. Years of hounding the duty desk had paid off. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“Good news. I believe we’ve identified your Jane Doe.”