] 24 [

Monday, November 29, 5 p.m.

One of the sinister benefits of a life in policework was the context it gave one’s own troubles. Many times, Hazel had reflected on a lost child, a life being ruined by drugs, those who died by their own hands. The suicides both haunted and reassured her: they were object lessons in how bad it hadn’t been in her own life, even when she and Andrew were splitting up, even when one of Marty’s depressions felt like thunder in the distance of her own life. In the midst of the joy-occluding pain she sometimes felt in her body, she could still take inventory in comparison and know how good her life was. So it was a revelation of the darkest kind when she realized there was nothing that could contrast with this moment in her life now. That there wasn’t someone else’s shoes she could be grateful for not being in.

There had been no news for the rest of Sunday. She felt as if she were standing over a huge body of water into which someone had vanished and she was telling herself not to give up hope. Maybe a person can hold their breath for this long. Maybe they can tread water for this long.

Monday morning, nothing. They’d expanded the road-to-road sweep into the smaller towns lining the 121 to the west, and all of the towns and villages within fifty kilometres of Highway 41 all the way to Fort Leonard. No one who listened to the radio, watched the television, or read the Westmuir Record could not be aware that the largest manhunt in the county’s history was unfolding over every inch of it. Sunderland had, for the second time in as many weeks, spent the entire weekend resetting his front section. It was now dedicated to Emily Micallef ’s abduction and Clara Lyon’s murder. His introduction to Adjutor Sevigny had inspired in the editor a certain new caution: the paper reported the latest tragedies to hit Port Dundas with something approaching sobriety. The bodily insult done, in various forms, to another five of the town’s elderly population did not result in any woolly speculation on how safe it may or may not be to enjoy one’s retirement in Port Dundas. However, sitting with nothing in front of her at the kitchen table but the paper, Hazel could not bring herself to feel grateful for the Record’s newfound discipline. She was looking at a picture of her mother standing in front of Micallef ’s in 1952, her chin high, eyes bright, with that self-possessed smile of hers. Most children think of themselves as immortal, but as a child, Hazel had always looked into this confident face and believed that her mother was the immortal one. She lowered her head into her hands and wept.

At his supper break, Wingate showed up at the house with food. He stood in her doorway, willing her to say or do anything to him she felt she had to, but after a moment of staring into her red-rimmed eyes, he simply put down his bags, stepped into the foyer, and held her. She turned and led him down the hall and into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on for coffee. “I know you haven’t eaten,” he said.

“Not hungry.”

“You could need your strength at any moment,” he said.

She leaned against the counter. “You mean to help me bear up when the bad news comes?”

“I mean to lead.”

She laughed, a dry, clicking sound in her throat. “Sure, James. From my empty living room in Pember Lake.”

“You have no idea how many of us have personally made our opposition to Mason’s decision known to both him as well as anyone they can get through to at the OPS head office in Toronto. You have everyone on your side.”

“Have you spoken to Mason to oppose his decision?”

He hefted his bags onto the kitchen table and without looking up, he said, “I’m not Ray Greene.”

“I know that,” she said. “Ray would have brought me whiskey.” She watched as he expressionlessly removed a sixteen-ouncer from one of the bags and put it on the table. “Ah,” she said.

He sat down awkwardly at the small table and arranged the rest of his purchases. Cheese, deli meat, bread, a large bar of dark chocolate. She saw the chocolate and felt hungry for the first time in two days. She poured the hot water into a mug and put it and a jar of coffee grains in front of him, but didn’t give him a spoon. He said nothing; it seemed a lot to ask for a spoon at this moment. At the station house, there had been a lot of whispering about Hazel having been under a doctor’s supervision for some time. If she hadn’t been, he hoped she was now, or would be soon. He knew what intractable grief could do to a person. He looked at her carefully as she reached into her cupboards for a couple of plates. He saw she was sockless in slacks and a freshly ironed blue dress shirt. It was as if she’d dressed the role to the 60 per cent mark and stopped. He half expected to see an empty holster on her hip.

“You want me to make you a sandwich, or are you skipping right to the chocolate?” he asked.

“I’m going to be positive and say that sometime soon there’s going to be someone back in this house telling me what to eat. So yes, I’ll have the chocolate now.”

He passed it to her and she unwrapped it. The smell of the dark bar caused her mouth to fill with saliva. She imagined she might look like a starving dog. When she bit into the chocolate, the glands at the back of her jaw clenched with such force that she thought she was going to cry out in pain.

“To answer your question, yes, I did tell Mason how I felt. He gave me a choice to wait and hear the outcome of the investigation in Barrie or to lead it here in Port Dundas.”

“Did you call him ‘sir’?”

“I didn’t call him what I wanted to call him.” He tore a chunk from the baguette with his bare hands and then split it open. “I did tell him that if Simon Mallick had shown up at Humber Cottage three days ago that Mason would be having his picture taken beside you right now.”

“The thing you should be asking yourself right now, James, is whether or not a bottle of Scotch and a loaf of bread is enough to make you a codefendant in the eyes of the magistrates of Renfrew and Westmuir counties.”

“I’d sit at that table with you, Hazel.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

She put a full carton of milk and the sugar bowl on the table, and then finally noticed he didn’t have a spoon, and she placed one in front of him wordlessly. “Look,” he said, “there’s something I have to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I get why Ray quit. I understand why he did what he did.”

“I see.”

“They told us when we were cadets that nothing was personal when it came to the world outside the station-house door. But that inside the doors, we’re family.”

“And I got that wrong?”

“You saw a killing in your own town as a personal affront. You were willing to do anything to get this guy. You crossed all kinds of lines.”

It hurt to hear him talk this way, more perhaps than the way Greene had spoken to her. Wingate bore her no ill-will. He was telling her the truth. “Well, I’ve been punished then.”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the same thing, maybe. In your shoes. I know a little about what it feels like to want to avenge something.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Another time,” he said. He tore off a piece of bread and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment, looking down at the table. “I just want to say that we should have all gone down together. You’re the skip. You lead, we follow. But we shouldn’t have been that far in back of you, Hazel. Ray Greene was better than that. I’m better than that.”

She felt sodden, sinking into the floor. “I wish I was going to have the chance to make it up to you, James, I really do.”

“You might. When the dust settles they’re going to take a long look at this place and try to decide how they want it to run.”

“They’re going to amalgamate us. Everything that just happened here is catnip to Ian Mason. Greene was right. God knows Mason’ll probably tap him to take over.” She looked over at Wingate and the colour had drained out of his face. “You’re kidding me.”

“I was going to circle around it a while longer. Get a sense of how hard you were willing to fight before I told you.”

“God.”

“They haven’t asked him yet. They wanted to test it out on us.”

“I don’t think it’s going to matter what you want, James. That’s not how they work.”

“I said I understood why Ray did what he did. But I never said I agreed with it. Nobody wants to work for Ray Greene. We want to work for you.”

She reached for the instant and turned to stir a spoonful of it into her cup. “You people shouldn’t be wasting your energy trying to save my bacon.”

She heard his chair slide back suddenly and she turned and he was leaning over his fists on the table. “Do you see? Do you see what you said? We’re not trying to save just your god-damned bacon, Hazel!” His arms were shaking.

“I’m sorry, James.”

“Family inside, the rest of the world outside. That’s how I was trained to see it. If we fight for you, will you try to see it that way?”

“Yes,” she said, thoroughly ashamed. “I’ll try.”

He slowly sat back in his seat, his eyes sliding away from her. Who was this young man, she wondered? This ferocious young man? Would she survive all of this to be permitted to return to that world he lived in?

“I heard from Sevigny this morning.”

“You did, eh.”

“He called from some back room in the courthouse in Sudbury.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“Nothing good.” He made eye contact with her again. “Hazel, he searched Jane Buck’s house before he left Port Hardy.”

“What?”

“Told me she wanted to help our investigation. I think it might have been a euphemism.”

“Christ, James! Why didn’t you say that as soon as you walked in?”

“I had more important things to say first.” She came to the table, drew a chair out, and sat. He watched her process what he’d just said. He wondered if his treatment of her here today would come back to haunt him. “He said he’d had an intuition about Buck when they were out at the cabin. She flinched when he took the Lord’s name in vain. So he took her home and ‘motivated her’ was how he put it.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“He spared me the details. He had the right instinct about her though: turns out she was the church secretary. She’d been in it right from the beginning; she had all kinds of paraphernalia.” He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a couple of folded sheets. “He talked some clerk at the Sudbury courthouse into faxing this for him. It’s the back and front of a pamphlet advertising the church. It’s from 1988.”

She unfolded it and began to read. The pamphlet invited those who were dissatisfied with their own churches to consider one that understood the conditions under which the True Christ would return. “Will the Christ,” she read aloud, “who suffered in the wilderness, come to deliver those who wear furs and whose breath stinks of blood? In whose veins unnatural abominations run?” She looked up at Wingate.

“Keep going,” he said.

The pamphlet asked the reader to consider whether the Son of God would descend to deliver the venal from their false gods. The church proposed a return to severe purity. Its touch-stones were extreme hygiene, a diet based in local and natural foods, and an obsessive belief that it was only to a wilderness imbued with this kind of propriety and integrity that Christ would return. Modern medicine of any description was forbidden. It was a short argument, intended to attract only those who were already halfway there. The leader of the group was Simon Mallick.

“There’s a picture of him at the bottom of the second page,” Wingate said, and he folded back the page she was reading. There was a picture of a man at the bottom of the last section. He sported a huge, black beard and was as stout as a Viking.

“That’s Simon Mallick?” said Hazel, looking at Wingate.

“Exactly.”

There was no doubt in her mind that the man pictured in the pamphlet was the same man whose body Detective Sevigny had discovered in the Port Hardy cabin. The Simon drawn by Rose Batten was a different man: a wiry, rat-eyed creature. Pinched, angry, desperate. The one in the pamphlet was a Buddha: soft, calm, with laughlines around his eyes. The charisma of one who could draw in the lost and needy.

“Jane Buck called the man in the cabin Peter,” said Wingate. “So if the dead man is actually Simon Mallick…”

“Then the man in Rose’s drawing–?”

“–has taken his brother’s name.”

“And he’s stalking the countryside rebuilding his brother’s church.” She refolded the faxed sheets and handed them back to her new CO. “Well, there’s the reason there’s been no activity in any of Simon Mallick’s accounts. We’ve plugged the wrong name into the database.”

“Costamides is already on it.”

“Wow. When they let Sevigny out of jail they should give him a promotion.” She sat thinking for a moment. “If you guys are prepared to fight for me, we might as well start now.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” He stood and picked his cap off the table.

She poured the coffees into the sink. “Bring the chocolate,” she said.

 

No one attempted to stop her.

Hazel, in full uniform, went through the front doors of the station house and into the pen. Everyone stood as she passed and a few saluted. She had never been saluted inside her building. She went to the back of the room. “Anyone who feels they can’t work under me can leave with no fear of consequence,” she said. “If you stay, you’re in direct violation of an order from the commander of the Ontario Police Services. So make up your mind right now.”

There was no movement in the room.

“I want to apologize to you all for the chaos you’ve been operating under. Obviously nothing could have prepared us for this. You’ve all been consummate professionals, and no matter what Mason tries to do to us as a team, your grace under pressure these last few days, and your dedication, will be the stuff of legend in this town.” She scanned the men and women standing before her, and Cassie Jenner, standing closest to her, passed her a tissue. She’d spoken with force, her voice unwavering, but she’d wept steadily. She refused the tissue and stood before them all, her face red and streaked and stared at them. “I hope you understand what it means to me, to have your support.”

“All due respect to Detective Wingate,” came the voice of PC Peter MacTier, “but welcome back, Skip.” Under any other circumstance, she could imagine the room breaking into applause, but instead, she felt every eye on her, and she knew there was not a dissenter among them. She imagined their unity might have a salutary effect on Mason when it came time to decide what to do with her. Although she doubted it.

Wingate said, “I’ve briefed the skip on what Detective Sevigny learned, and although it isn’t exactly a break in the case, at least we know now who we’re dealing with. Have we heard back from the credit card companies?”

“I’ve got it all,” said Sergeant Costamides. “He hasn’t used a credit card since May. I guess he thought better of taking it with him. But the last thing he used it for was heavy-duty painkillers and sedatives.”

“Broke his own rules,” said Hazel. “Things must have been getting bad at home.”

“He took out eight hundred dollars from a bank machine in Norway House, and since then there’s only been one more withdrawal, in Pictou, for three hundred. There’s only two hundred left in the account.”

“Let’s hope he needs it soon,” said Wingate.

Her people, her mother’s only hope, returned to their desks. Phone tips had been coming in since Saturday afternoon, but nothing had led anywhere. Peter Mallick was not going to be caught by a stray sighting. As the evening wore on, few of her people spoke to her directly, but they would touch her as they passed, keeping their hands on her for slightly longer than necessary, to let her know they were there, they were with her.

She stayed out of view as much as she could, in her office or in the rear hallways. At shift change, Wingate passed her in the hall, and in answer to her unspoken question, shook his head.

“Every minute that passes could be her last one on this earth. And we don’t know.”

“Is there anything at all that I can do?” he asked.

“I need something to keep my mind occupied.”

He gestured with his chin to the pen. “You want a desk out there?”

“No. It’ll distract them. How far behind are we on reports?”

“I’m sure they’re piling up.”

“Will you bring me some? I’m sure they’ll have to be redone, but it’s better than pacing.”

She waited for him in her office, and he came in with a cup of coffee and a white file folder. She took both from him silently, and he stood in front of her desk with his hands folded in front of him. “It wasn’t worth it,” she said. “I ran him right into my own house.”

“You don’t know yet if it was worth it, Hazel. Everyone out there is ready for when the next thing happens, and you need to be ready too. Be what it’s hard to be right now.”

She filled her chest with air and let it out heavily. “Thank you, James.”

He left, and she pulled the incident reports toward her. The folder contained the usual passel of complaints, disputes, petty thefts, and vandalism that made for an average month in Port Dundas. Hazel scanned the reports for names she knew and came across three familiar last names, all sons or grandsons of respectable people from the town and environs. What would Percy Adamsen think of his sweet grandson Arthur driving off with a full tank from the Beaver gas station on Bethune Road? Or Temperance McMurtry, dead now almost forty years, what would she make of her great-grandson Nicholas Grant, who’d been caught smoking a bong in the shape of a breast in Centennial Park on the previous Saturday night? Perhaps they wouldn’t be surprised at all: the younger generation always appears to be headed for disaster anyway, doesn’t it?

She wrote her notes in the files, setting aside a couple for follow-up in an unimaginable future when everything would be normal again. She felt amazed at herself that she was even capable of such an activity. She recalled that Nick Grant had hot-wired a car out in Kenniston two years earlier and made a mental note to visit him and speak to him personally about the direction he was heading in. It was hard to scare kids these days, though, and she imagined if she did give him a talking-to that she’d be fodder for comedy at Gilman High the very next day. As she was plotting what she should do with this young man, a swooping wave of terror suddenly passed through her and she realized that, for the first time in three days, she was not thinking about her mother. The switch out of those thoughts and then back into them came with a sensation like an electrical shock.

Wingate knocked and came in. “I thought you’d like to see this one too,” he said. She reached across for the folder he was holding and cast her eyes down on it. “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“After all this time, she files a report? She must have been pretty upset to find out what happened to her kitty.”

“It’s not legal to keep a cougar as a housepet,” said Wingate. “She was hoping it would come home on its own.”

Hazel closed the file. “I guess that’s not going to happen.”

“I’m supposed to ask you what we did with the body.”

“Ah,” she said. “It went to the Metro Zoo for study purposes. She’ll have to call them.”

“One case closed.”

“Next,” she said.

 

At three-thirty in the morning, feeling her lower back seize and unseize, she got up to walk through the building. She went through the pen like a ghost, unmarked, and passed into the back hallway that led into the cells below, cells that were almost permanently empty. Even their so-called worst criminals (how she longed for those men and women now: purse snatchers, drunk drivers, speeders) were reasonable people: there was rarely a reason to lock someone up. The first time the Central OPS had tried to cut the size of the Port Dundas force, her mother had been mayor, and she’d shown her disapproval by insisting she be locked in one of the cells. Hazel had been a cadet at the time and had not been terribly impressed by the stunt. But it worked: Central hadn’t cut anyone. That was 1973. Hazel recalled standing where she was right now, watching her mother sitting in the cell making a salad for her supper. She was sitting on that very bench, cutting a tomato in her hand into a wooden bowl. That’s how she always cut a tomato, Hazel thought in a wonder of heartache, never with a cutting board, but in the palm of her hand.

She walked back to the stairs gingerly, turning to face them once to stretch out the back of her leg. In the basement, the lights were off, and it was cool and dark. She had the thought of letting herself into one of the cells and curling up for a couple of hours, but thought better of it and went back to the ground floor. When she got there Wingate was standing in the back hallway, his arms at his sides and his irises as small as pinheads. He said nothing but turned and began walking, and she knew to follow him.

In the pen, they were all standing, as if to show their respect. But they had their backs to her, and two of them near the front of the room had their guns drawn and trained on Staff Sergeant Wilton’s counter. The man who called himself Simon Mallick was standing calmly in the waiting area in front of the counter, his hands at his sides. She stared at him as if she had in fact gone to sleep in the cells and dreamed him. But he saw her and stepped forward. “Detective Inspector,” he said, and she could hear two officers holding their guns on him take their safeties off.

The small, silent group of men and women parted as Hazel walked through them. The air felt as if it had turned to syrup. She was worried that Peter Mallick would vanish if she took her eyes off him. “Lower your weapons,” she said to her officers as she walked past them, and then she was face-to-face with him. His starving eyes were set in his head like yellow jewels. He regarded her almost expressionlessly, although (so the thought went through her mind) he seemed faintly relieved to see her.

“What have you done with my mother, Peter?”

He blinked slowly. “My name is Simon.”

“What have you done with her?”

“I’ve brought my car,” he said. “If you’d like to come with me, I’d be grateful if you’d allow one of your officers to handcuff you.”

“Handcuffing me isn’t going to stop me from killing you.”

“It would be unsafe for us both if we had an altercation while I was driving.”

“Where is she?”

He folded his hands in front of himself. She saw now that his left hand was wrapped tightly in discoloured gauze the colour of a bruise. He looked like a dying crow, his wings tattered, his stubbled, piebald skull. “I am as unhappy at this turn of events as you must be, Hazel Micallef, but we need each other right now, and time is not on your mother’s side, so please do allow one of your men to prepare you for your trip.”

She heard Wingate’s voice behind her. “We can’t let you take her, sir. I’m sure you understand that. But I’ll be happy to accompany you and hear you out. It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure no one else is hurt.”

“James–” Hazel began, but Mallick held his hand up.

“James what?” he asked.

“Wingate.”

“Ah. Detective or Officer Wingate?”

“Detective Constable,” James said, coming closer to the front counter.

“Were you part of the grand plan to draw me back to Humber Cottage?”

“That’s not important right now.”

“No, of course not,” said Peter Mallick. “But you must have had high hopes. I picture you squatting in wait behind a juniper bush at three in the morning, tasting your victory. Now look where we are.”

“We underestimated you,” said Wingate in a conciliatory tone. “We did. But you haven’t made a single mistake in your entire journey. So why make one now? Take my gun. Cuff me. I’ll go with you willingly.”

“Is that really what you want, Detective Constable Wingate?”

“It’s the best solution.”

“Well, Detective Constable,” said the Belladonna, his voice as soft and comforting as a priest’s, “this is what I’d like to do. I’d like to slice you from hip to hip and collect your steaming bowels in a sack as you watched. And then, to put the images out of your mind, I’ll press your eyeballs through the back of their sockets with my thumbs until I feel them embed in your brain like candles in a birthday cake.” He offered Wingate a very small smile. “I don’t suppose you have any handcuffs on you?”

Wingate turned away from the force of Mallick’s eyes. “Skip, you put me in charge of this, you said–”

“Give me your handcuffs, James,” Hazel said.

“I can’t let you go with this man.”

Like a mechanized toy, Peter Mallick suddenly stepped forward and flung open the countertop. Wingate leapt back and Hazel held her hand up to warn the others to hold their fire. “If anyone follows us, I’ll kill us both,” said Peter. “Do you doubt me?”

“No,” said Wingate, his voice clenched in dread.

Hazel turned her wrists to him. Wingate unhooked his cuffs from his belt and locked them on her, put the key into Peter’s hand. She saw from the look in the detective’s eyes that he wanted some kind of permission from her, and she shook her head deliberately from side to side. His face fell.

Peter Mallick pocketed the key and held his ruined hand out to her. She went to him. “Good evening, one and all,” he said.