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From Pumpkin Eater,

Jeffrey Round’s Next Dan Sharp Mystery

Prologue: Toronto 2008

This Little Piggy

Darkness gripped him like a vice. The hush in the room was as soothing as a hand run over velvet. In the faint light filtering in from outside, everything was black on black, broken here and there by minute variations in grey. Uniform, minimalist. Against a far wall the outline of a girder dipped from the roof, twisted and warped like a giant DNA strand or a blackened starlit stairway to heaven. Closer up, the shell of a processing unit stood off to one side, vaguely threatening, like some obscure technology on a low-budget sci-fi set, impossible to say what it was if you didn’t know what spaceship you were on or what series you’d landed in.

Dan sniffed the air. The scent of smoke lingered, a disquieting charred odour, though it was more than two years since the fire that gutted the slaughterhouse’s interior. He took a step forward. From off to the right came a curious grinding noise, like a pebble crushed underfoot. Or maybe it was just his imagination. He froze.

“Darryl Hillary?” he called out. “My name is Dan Sharp. I’m a missing persons investigator. I’ve been hired by your sister.”

More silence.

It was just past two a.m. on a hot, humid August morning. Not the best weather for sleeping, though any bed would be better than this, Dan thought. His eyes searched out movement. He felt no fear on being there. It occurred to him that he was more at home here in darkness than in the light.

After fifteen years in the business, he was still surprised where he might end up looking for someone. During his first week on the job for a previous employer, a lifer with a big mouth informed him of the likelihood that a) he probably wouldn’t last a month, and b) he would never be able to predict where the job might land him on any given day. He’d long since proven the first wrong, but the second prediction had shown itself right time and again.

As anonymous tips went, the one that brought him here had seemed routine. At just past midnight his cellphone buzzed, registering a number at a phone booth. He heard what sounded like a fast-food outlet in the background — orders being called out over the din of communal eating in a room echoing with restless diners. In the foreground, a voice hard-wired by an indeterminate sexuality — it could have been a young man, his pitch notched up by nervousness, or a woman who’d smoked herself into a good baritone — puffed out the details of where to find his prey: a young man named Darryl Hillary.

Dan knew better than to ask the caller for personal details. He’d long since learned that the bearer of these messages often had something to hide or something to gain by passing along the information. You seldom learned what it was, but the information was usually good, when it wasn’t downright crazy or just implausible. But, hey, it took all kinds.

“That guy you’re looking for? Hillary? He’s hiding out in the old slaughterhouse near Keele and St. Clair. He’s there now.”

Dan’s mind went into overdrive: something about a suspicious fire, a big investigation into arson, allegations of insurance fraud involving unpaid government loans.

Play dumb, he told himself. “Didn’t that burn down a couple of years ago?”

“Yeah, North York Pork. That’s the one. But the building’s mostly still there.”

“What’s he hiding from?”

There was a pause. He shouldn’t have pushed. That was all he’d get now. He’d lost whoever was talking.

“Don’t you know?”

“Maybe, but I wondered what you could tell me.”

“Nothing. That’s it.”

The line went dead, the food court disappearing into oblivion. In his mind, Dan followed the trail backward: fast-food outlet, supermarket, meat distributor, slaughterhouse, and, finally, the farm. This little piggy goes to market. A curious connection but ultimately meaningless, he suspected. He recalled the newspaper photos of the fire engines, hoses turned skyward on a bleak winter day, as well as additional shots: a humorous sidebar of char-blackened pork sides prepped for processing, now permanently overdone. If it was arson, then whoever set it had at least had the good sense to do it after the slaughter, rather than get the animal activists riled at the thought of an abattoir of live pigs going up in flames.

The connections Dan had with his sources were obscure almost to the point of being non-existent. Sometimes the contact of a contact would phone or send him a message — for cash, of course. If there was news to be had, there was a price tag to go with it. What you learned after paying your snitch fee was anybody’s guess, and where the tip came from was nobody’s business. That wasn’t Dan’s concern. Finding his client was. As long as the information put him in touch with the right person, then it was all the same to him. With some, you could never tell. A tip leading to an abandoned slaughterhouse might be just the ticket, or it could be a blind lead. The only way to know for sure was to follow it.