Carrie MacDonald’s apartment building was ringed with squad cars by the time Green and Sullivan arrived. Revolving splashes of red flashed off the yellow plastic tape stretched all around the front yard and lobby. Curious neighbours and passers-by had already begun to gather. Green barrelled through the crowd to the policeman at the door.
“What the hell happened?” he roared.
“Dispatch got a 911 at two forty-six from the occupant of 106, sir,” the officer replied. “She reported a break-in—”
“What about Carrie! Oh, goddamn it, I’ll see for myself!” Green rushed down the hall, ducked under the tape at the entrance to her apartment and started across the living room.
“Hold it, Mike!”
He swung around, startled. Lou Paquette from the Ident Unit was standing in the corner of the room, sketchbook in hand. He stared at Green incredulously.
“Do you mind? Look at this place! You kick one paper out of the way and I might as well kiss the scene good-bye. Check with me, for fuck’s sake.”
Green paused in his tracks, breathing deeply to restore calm. It would do no good to show his feelings. Glancing around, he realized the enormity of his error. The room was in chaos. Papers and clothing littered the carpet. Cushions had been tossed from the couch and chairs overturned. Seeing Green’s expression, Paquette nodded.
“It was either one hell of a fight or someone was looking for something.”
“Where?” Green croaked. “In her bedroom. MacPhail’s been called. Mike—” he called as Green turned gingerly to continue on his way, “my men aren’t done in there either.”
Green paused in the doorway to the bedroom, shut his eyes and took three deep gulps of air. Through them he heard Paquette’s team muttering. There were two men in the room, one taking pictures, the other doing an initial search for physical evidence. With one final gulp of air, he opened his eyes. Carrie lay sprawled naked on her back across the bed, her head flung back and her expression frozen in surprise. Blood covered her forehead and settled in crusting pools beneath her head.
“Oh, oh,” he heard someone say. “Green’s about to do his passing-out routine.”
“I am not,” he replied, stepping over to the bedside. “What have we got? Gunshot wound?”
“Yup,” said the Ident officer. “One shot between the eyes. But this time I think we got lucky. Look in her hand.” He pointed. Following his finger, Green forced himself to look back at the body. Past her long, blood-soaked locks, past her vacant blue eyes, down her outflung arm to her hand. There, clutched in her death grip, was his own necktie.
* * *
Green was sitting by the toilet bowl resting his head in his hand when Sullivan found him. They were in the apartment next door, temporarily commandeered as a field command post. Teams from forensics and pathology buzzed about in the outer living room, and now and then shouts punctuated the hum.
“Jeez, Mike, get a grip!” exclaimed Sullivan, leaning against the bathroom door. “Information is coming in fast and furious. We need to stay on top of it.”
With an effort, Green rallied his professional front and pulled himself to his feet. “What have we got so far?”
“MacPhail’s made a preliminary ETD between eleven a.m. and one p.m. He thinks she was dead three or four hours before she was found, shot from probably five to six feet away with a small caliber gun. Killer probably surprised her in bed. There are no defensive wounds and no sign of a struggle, just one neat, clean bullet to the head.”
Green swallowed and groped for strength. “Any sign of sexual…?”
“Assault?” Sullivan shook his head. “No obvious bruising or tearing, although of course MacPhail will have to check for semen. But I don’t think the motive for this was sex.”
“No. This has to do with Jonathan Blair.” “Yeah, the mess was probably made after the murder. The killer was looking for something.”
Green gripped the edge of the sink, swaying as a fresh wave of nausea swept over him. “I should have prevented this. Goddamn it, I told her I’d get her protection!”
“Mike, who could have known—” “She left a ten-year old kid behind.” Green stiffened. “Fuck, the kid!”
“We got the Children’s Aid to intercept her at the school bus, so she wouldn’t come home to this.”
“Yeah, but her mother’s dead, her grandmother’s dead. She’s got nobody, all because I…” Green couldn’t finish.
Sullivan sobered. “I know. It stinks. But she’s the one who talked to the press, not us.”
“And that makes this her fault? I forgot! I forgot to arrange the protection.”
“It probably wouldn’t have been approved anyway.”
“I would have paid for the hotel out of my own pocket!”
Sullivan touched his shoulder, frowning. “Hey buddy, it’s done. Don’t beat yourself up. The hit was fast, probably too fast to get protection in place anyway. The best we can do for her now is find her killer. At least now we have loads more forensic evidence to sift through. And—we have the tie! That’s something we didn’t have before. Forensics will put it through every test ever invented. We’ll get sweat, we’ll get skin cells, and they just might help us nail him!”
Green stared at the faded tiles at his feet. “The tie’s mine.”
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “I said the tie’s mine.”
“What the fuck is it doing here?”
“I—I was here this morning to warn her about talking to the press. To tell her to move out for a few days, actually.”
“But how—” Sullivan broke off, comprehension dawning. Green felt his cheeks flush hot. He felt Sullivan’s eyes upon him, disbelief gradually growing cold. “You stupid sonofabitch,” Sullivan muttered. “Never could keep it in your pants, could you? When are you going to grow up, Green?”
“Sh-h!” Green swung the bathroom door shut. Anger, slow in coming, began to take hold. “For your information, nothing happened! I stopped it. But in trying to get away with my marriage vows intact, I forgot my tie. She must have brought it into her bedroom.” A deep flush crept up his neck as a thought occurred to him. Her eyes, when he left her that morning, had been hot with need.
In spite of himself, Sullivan began to laugh. “This will look good in the headlines.”
Green winced. “Could you maybe talk to Paquette? Keep a lid on this thing?”
“Oh no, you can do your own clean-up. I wish you luck. There’s a dozen guys out there, and in half an hour they’ll all know Mike Green left his tie behind. You think they’ll sit on that? This is the best dirt they’ve had since you got married. We may be able to keep it out of the media, but sure as hell not out of the locker room.”
Green leaned his head back against the bathroom wall. “Shit. If Sharon finds out…”
“Hey, if nothing happened…”
“The way things are right now, I’m not sure she’ll believe it.”
“Maybe the gossip won’t reach her. She’s not exactly on the officers’ wives hotline.” Sullivan clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got a case to solve.”
Reluctantly Green followed Sullivan back into Carrie MacDonald’s apartment. The bedroom door was closed, for which he was grateful. It allowed him to keep his detachment. Paquette and his men were covering the living room in a grid inch by inch, photographing, sketching, scraping and dusting. When he spotted them in the doorway, Paquette got up from his knees to join them, mopping sweat from his brow.
“Any clue why he trashed the place?” he wheezed, coughing. “What was he looking for?”
Green nodded. “She had drawn four sketches of people in the library at the time of the murder. I meant to bring them to the station, but unfortunately…” He trailed off, remembering how his hormones had chased all rational thought from his mind. “The killer was probably after them, or something else he thought incriminated him. If we can figure out what he took, we may have him.”
It was four hours before the Ident Unit had worked its way through all Carrie’s papers and had handed them over to Green. He took five minutes to flip through them all before he looked up at Sullivan with a puzzled frown.
“That’s funny. He’s taken two of the sketches. The dark-haired man with the mustache—our mystery student at the elevator.”
“So? That’s good. The Haddads are dark-haired.”
“But he also took the sketch of Jonathan Blair. What possible use is that?”
All the way back to the police station, Green wrestled with that curious twist. Nothing fit together. Violence was no stranger to the man who had killed Blair and Carrie. He knew exactly when and where to strike, so his victims never had a chance. The knife and shirt had been found in Haddad’s garage, but Eddie and Paul Haddad were too fresh and guileless, too sheltered to be that deadly. It also bothered him that the sketch of Jonathan had been taken and that Jonathan’s wallet had never been found.
But when he and Sullivan arrived back at his office to check field reports, he learned three facts which made him rethink his opinion.
First, a preliminary memo from the officer looking into the Haddad sons’ background reported that Eddie belonged to the Arab League, a student group composed mainly of Muslim exchange students from Arab countries. Within the Arab League was a militant core which was anti-Western in its bias and highly inflammatory in its rhetoric. Eddie was not one of this inner circle—as a Canadian and a Christian he was excluded from full acceptance—but he hung around on the fringes eagerly soaking up the zeal.
Secondly, on the night of Blair’s murder, a neighbour across the street from the Haddad house had been out walking his dog and had seen a dark silhouette slip out the side door of the Haddad house, climb on a bicycle and pedal away into the dark. The neighbour had been uncertain about the time, but guessed it was about ten.
The third fact was almost icing on the cake. When Green checked the times at which the three Haddads had been brought in for questioning that day, he found the father and the younger son could not have killed Carrie. The father had been picked up at the store about eleven o’clock and Paul from a friend’s house in the south end of the city at eleven twenty-five. But Eddie had not been found until one-ten. He had skipped his morning shift at work and had arrived for the afternoon dishevelled and out of breath.
And of course, Eddie had a mustache.
* * *
“Jesus, why don’t we arrest him?” Sullivan exclaimed.
Green sighed and rubbed his eyes. They were hunched over two Harvey’s All-dressed burgers, taking stock of the case. The sun was setting, and the Friday night tattoo-and-leather crowd was just emerging on Rideau Street, but both men barely noticed them. They had been at work for over twelve hours. Sullivan was anxious for some closure, but Green just couldn’t face going home.
“The noose isn’t tight enough yet,” he replied doggedly. “We’ve got to substantiate the neighbour’s report that someone sneaked out that night. The family swears they were all home together. Eddie’s not going anywhere. When I’ve broken his alibi, we’ll pick him up.”
“What are you talking about! He could skip to Lebanon on the very next plane.”
Green fell silent. Sullivan was right. One person was already dead because of his failure to act. And if Eddie did skip, it would be the end of both their careers. Great, he thought, marriage and career both dead in one fell swoop.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll put a surveillance team on him to make sure he doesn’t skip. If I can prove it was him who sneaked out that night, we’ll go straight out to pick him up. For now, go home and get some sleep.”
“What about you?”
“I…” Green wavered. The time for Shabbat dinner had come and gone. Sharon would have waited a while, then lit the candles, sung the prayers and gone on without him. He felt a twinge of regret. Shabbat was supposed to be about sharing. But he didn’t even know whether Sharon had begun her shift early or late tonight, or indeed at all.
Sullivan had always been a fierce believer in marriage, both Green’s and his own. How could he tell him what was happening? Sullivan would see it as all his fault. You have to put your family first, he’d lectured after Green’s first wife left. Sullivan played hockey with his boys on the front drive, sat in the front row at his daughter’s dance recitals and got sappy poems from his kids on Father’s Day. Green wondered what his own first real Father’s Day would be like this year, with Sharon not speaking to him and his son barely knowing who he was.
And whose fault is that? a small voice said. If you hurry, you can still catch the candles before they burn down completely.
“I’m going to shake the tree a little first,” he replied.
* * *
The Haddads lived in a small post-war bungalow in a modest suburb. Moonlight tipped the white blossoms of the bridal wreath spirea dwarfing the front walk, and a wispy breeze stirred the humid air. As Green approached the front walk, he heard voices raised in anger. A moment later, the front door flung back, and Paul stormed out, hurling obscenities in his wake.
“Fuck you! Fuck all of you! Maybe I’ll let the goddamn cops know what kind of family we really are!”
“Paulie!” came two male shouts from within, but he had slammed the door.
He stomped down the cracked cement walk, head down and cursing, until he literally collided with Green. He recoiled, eyes wide with fright. “What the fuck!”
Green placed his fingers to his lips and steered him adroitly down the path. “Just a few questions.”
Paul jerked his arm loose. “If you think I’m talking to you, you’re out of your mind!”
“You got to talk to somebody sometime, Paul. You can’t keep it inside forever.”
“I’m not talking to you!”
“They want you to lie for them, don’t they?”
Paul turned ghostly in the moonlight. “What are you talking about?”
“Say you were all home all night Tuesday.”
“It’s true!”
“No, it’s not. One of you sneaked out. Neighbours have eyes, you know. I’m betting it was you.”
Paul backed up, shaking his head. “It wasn’t me!”
“You’re blaming Eddie again?”
“No! I’m not blaming Eddie.”
“Let me see your bicycle.”
“Why?”
“Because the neighbour saw the bicycle.”
“I don’t have to show you anything!”
Green shook his head with a sigh. “Tough guy. Okay, Paulie, get in my car. We’ll go downtown.”
“Eddie rides my bike! All the time, without asking me!”
“So it was Eddie?”
Paul turned in a circle like a caged animal, swearing softly. “It’s always Eddie. Goddamn prick, you’d think he was a saint the way they act. It’s always me that catches the shit!”
Green let Paul continue on his way, humbled and scared, and turned his attention back to the house. It was silent now, and the grey light of the television flickered on the drapes. He was all set to ring the bell and confront Eddie when he heard a low whistle from across the street. Inside a dark brown Taurus parked at the curb, he could just make out a figure beckoning to him. It proved to be Constable Wicks, who had been assigned to surveillance.
“Do you want me to stay, sir, or are you handling things from here on?”
Green vacillated then climbed in the car. “Let’s watch them a bit, see if we learn anything interesting. This family is beginning to crack apart at the seams.”
Over the next hour they shared a thermos of coffee and a doughnut. As it passed eleven, the lights gradually began to go out in the house.
Beside him, the officer yawned. “They’re not cracking apart very fast, sir, that’s for sure.”
Green held up his hand. A shadow of movement had caught his eye. Straining to see through the darkness, he made out a stealthy figure slipping past the overgrown lilacs at the side of the house. The figure emerged onto the driveway, wheeling a bike, and coasted down the drive towards them. By the time he hit the street he was pedalling hard. As he swung left in front of them, Green caught a glimpse of a mustache.
“Follow him! Carefully!”
Eddie pedalled at a steady thirty kilometres an hour, a fast, experienced cyclist familiar with his route. They trailed him for fifteen minutes through the looping suburban crescents and out onto Alta Vista Drive, but at the busy intersection of Riverside and Industrial Avenue, they lost him. Sitting at the traffic light, they watched helplessly as he turned off onto a bicycle path and vanished into the trees.
Constable Wicks broke in on Green’s cursing. “We could go ahead and try to catch him at the other end.”
Green shook his head. “There are too many exits. He’s going downtown, but where?”
“At this hour, a bar in the market, maybe?”
Green smacked the dashboard. “Let’s go back to his house and wait for him to come home. Then he’ll bloody well tell me.”
It was five a.m., however, before Eddie Haddad pedalled wearily back up the street. Sunrise cast shafts of lemony light between the houses. Constable Wicks was fast asleep behind the wheel, and Green had spent the last few hours trying to keep his mind on the case and off the wreckage of his life. Carrie MacDonald kept floating into view, luscious, playful and despite all she had been through, so fatally naïve. How had the killer got in? Why had she been naked? Why so unsuspecting while the killer aimed the deadly bullet at her head? Had she been asleep, maybe dreaming of him? Why hadn’t he sent someone to protect her? Why hadn’t he stayed with her himself? She had needed him. He could hear her cries ringing in his ears.
He shut his eyes, trying to escape. Only to see Sharon slumped at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, her voice too weary for a fight. She would be at work right now, in this god-forsaken dead of night, probably holding some insomniac’s shaky hand and scrounging within herself for the strength to comfort.
He forced his eyes open again. Come home, Eddie, he entreated silently, before I crack up. But it was another two hours before he drifted off into a twilight sleep. The ticking of bicycle gears jolted him awake. He leaped out of the car just as the youth pedalled past. Startled, Eddie nearly fell off his bike.
“Into the car!” Green grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. Eddie was so panic-stricken that he obeyed without question. Only when they were both seated in the back seat did he recover some bluster.
“What the hell are you doing? Spying on me?”
“Exactly. And you’ve got a lot to explain. Where did you go tonight?”
“None of your goddamn business!”
Green held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart in front of Eddie’s face. “Listen, Eddie, you’re about this far away from a double murder charge, so you better start talking. Your alibi’s blown. A neighbour saw you sneak out of the house at ten p.m. on the night Blair died. I’ve seen the speed you ride that bike. For you it would be a piece of cake to make it down to the library for ten forty-five. So if you didn’t murder Jonathan Blair, you better tell me where the hell you went!”
Constable Wicks had been rudely awakened by the scuffle and now twisted around so that he could watch them. Listening to Green, Eddie’s eyes darted first to the door handle and then back to the two men. Seeing himself outnumbered, he deflated.
“I didn’t kill Blair!” he whined. “I wasn’t anywhere near there. I just went out.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere. Just…to hang out with a friend.”
“What friend?”
“A…a friend, that’s all. They’re not part of this.”
“You think I’ll just take your word for it? Name!”
Eddie hung his head. “Just…just a girl. I—I don’t even know her name.”
Green raised an eyebrow. “A girl? You spent the night with a girl?”
“Hey, listen, a guy’s got to—”
“Where?”
Eddie licked his lips. “Ah…her house. Her parents’ house.” Green snorted. “So you sneaked out of your house, sneaked into hers, into her room, slept with her and sneaked out again before morning. All without her parents knowing?”
Eddie attempted a laugh. Colour was returning to his cheeks. “Yeah. You never been young?”
“Oh, I remember vividly. I still need a name or an address. Something I can verify.”
The colour faded again. “I—I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit! I remember every girl I laid when I was your age. You dream about it for weeks. Now, name and address.”
“I can’t tell you. I can’t.”
“What? You think you’ll get in trouble?”
“No.” Almost inaudibly. “She will.”
Green hesitated. He sensed fear, but not of him. “Look Eddie, I can be subtle when it’s not five a.m. I’ll talk to her quietly, without tipping off her family. But I have to verify your story.”
Eddie twisted around to look directly at him. “And if I don’t tell you, you’ll charge me with murder.”
“It’s a strong possibility.”
“Then charge me. Because you won’t get her name out of me.” His voice quivered with passion. “I won’t betray her like that.”
God, the purity of first love, Green thought as he dragged himself up the stairs towards his apartment. The flame so unwavering, the truth so clear. Not like his own murky mess. God knows what lay in store for him when he opened his door. Sharon would be just home from her night shift, drained and full of recriminations. What would he say? What could he say?
He found her sitting at the kitchen table, still dressed in her work clothes and sipping a cup of tea. The empty candlesticks had been pushed aside, and the morning newspaper was spread out on the table, headlining the news of Carrie’s murder. She raised her head as he appeared.
“Oh honey,” she murmured, “this must be awful for you.”
There was a softness in her eyes and a warmth in her voice that he had almost forgotten. Without warning, tears scalded his eyes and he turned away to hide them.
She stood up and moved to the stove. “Come, Mike. You’ll feel better with some tea.”
On rubber legs he eased himself into the chair opposite hers and watched her blurrily as she worked at the counter. He ached for the old days, when she would have taken him into her arms without hesitation. “I…I’m sorry I’ve been—” he tried when he could trust himself.
“I know.” She turned to put his cup in front of him. “Mike, some day we have to talk, but now is not the time. Not after the day you’ve had.”
“I don’t deserve this,” he murmured, resting his head in his hands. Grief, guilt and gratitude welled inside. He felt her fingers stroke his hair and he longed to wrap his arms around her waist. But all too soon, she withdrew and sat back down across from him.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said. “You’re exhausted. Drink your tea, and then go to bed. I’ll leave Tony at Mrs. Louks so nothing will disturb you.”
* * *
He awoke with a start to a loud hammering at the door. Shaking the fog from his head, he peered at the night table clock. One-fifteen. One-fifteen! Sunlight poured through a crack in the drapes. He bolted out of bed, groping for the pair of trousers that lay crumpled by the bed.
The hammering grew louder, and when he opened the front door, Jules strode past him into the hall. He was purple as he seized the phone lying disconnected on the hall table.
“How dare you unplug your phone in the middle of so important a case! You’ve left a half-dozen men milling aimlessly around downtown, a psychology professor without any direction, a stack of unanswered calls from the Deputy Chief, and these—” he flung a fistful of reports down on the hall table “—accumulating unnoticed on your desk.”
Green struggled to collect his wits. “My wife must have disconnected the phone to let me sleep. I only got in at seven-thirty this morning, Adam. I was on a stake-out all night.”
“You’re an inspector. I don’t need you on stake-outs, I need you in your office, providing direction.”
“I have to know where I’m going before I can do that,” Green retorted. “I’m coming in. Tell everyone to keep their pants on. I’ll just grab a coffee and a bagel—”
“No time!”
“Adam, I haven’t eaten in over fifteen hours! Do you want me to have any functioning brain cells left?” He met Jules’ steely eyes. “Tell Dr. Baker I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
When his coffee, juice and bagel were ready, he turned his mind to the reports. He quickly discovered that, contrary to Jules’ belief, he had read most of them already. I am on top of this case, he thought with annoyance. Every conceivable lead is being followed up.
Two reports were new to him, however, and since they pertained to the Haddad family’s activities just prior to Blair’s death, he bent over them eagerly as he gulped his coffee. A ticket agent at the Air Canada check-in counter remembered a very excited Lebanese family who had arrived to check a female relative onto a flight for New York. He had noticed the woman first of all because she was beautiful and secondly because she was crying. The men had argued among themselves in a mixture of Lebanese and English, so that the agent had only a partial grasp of the content. They seemed to be arguing about what to do next and how much they should tell the family in Beirut.
A girl who had been on the cash at the gift shop near the observation deck on Tuesday remembered three men who had stood at the observation window for about half an hour, arguing loudly in a combination of languages. After watching a jet take off, they had left together, sullen and subdued, at about eight-thirty.
Telephone records indicated that the elder Haddad had made half-a-dozen long-distance phone calls to Beirut between Sunday, June 8 and Tuesday, June 10, the last recorded at six forty-five p.m. Monday. No doubt to inform Raquel’s father in Beirut of the flight number and arrival time of her flight home.
Green studied the phone records curiously. There had been a tremendous flurry of activity in the two days preceding her departure to Beirut. What had happened to cause the sudden panic? Phone calls between Beirut and Ottawa prior to June 8 had averaged about two a month, always at the Sunday discount rates.
All these bits of evidence lent credence to the Haddads’ version of events. Somehow they had discovered Raquel was too involved with a Canadian boy and they had taken immediate, concrete action to end it. Emergency arrangements had been coordinated by phone with relatives in Lebanon, plane tickets booked, and the rebellious young woman personally escorted onto the aircraft. Archaic, perhaps, but perfectly above board. No outcry for vengeance and murder.
Only Eddie, full of youthful ideals, might have thought differently. Even worse, his alibi had been proven false; he had sneaked out of the house shortly before the murder and refused to give verifiable details about where he had gone. Still, it was much easier to picture Eddie swinging up a flower trellis to his lover’s window than driving a knife through another man’s ribs.
But if Eddie didn’t do it, what was the explanation for the knife and shirt found in the garage? The Haddad family said they must have been planted, an excuse he had heard a hundred times before. But what if this time it was true? Who would have framed them? Someone else with a motive for murder.
That idea brought him full circle back to the research data. To David Miller, Joe Difalco, Rosalind Simmons and even Myles Halton himself. Which one had wanted Blair silenced, and. more importantly, which one had the capacity to do it? The answers to these questions, he hoped, lay with Dr. Stan Baker and the computer files.
Aware of the tenuous thread by which his marriage hung, he searched about for some paper on which to leave Sharon a note of thanks. Earlier, she had reached out to him, however tentatively, and now it was his turn to reciprocate. It was then that he noticed the local tabloid crammed into the garbage can in the corner. He fished it out, curious that Sharon would have allowed the sensationalist rag to cross the threshold and wondering if she had noticed more news about the murders. Worse, he discovered. The headline was sprawled across the front page: “No Progress in Blair Case.”
And underneath was a picture of himself with the caption: “Investigator’s tie found in nude victim’s hand.”
“Fuck,” he muttered, a sick feeling settling in the pit of his stomach. It grew as the story, upon reading, proved even worse than the headline. One of Carrie’s neighbours had spotted Green buttoning his shirt as he ran from the apartment, and the reporter had somehow managed to hint, while deftly skirting the libel laws, that he’d been having an affair with Carrie MacDonald and was now stalling the investigation to prevent this from coming to light.
“Fuck. Fuck,” he repeated, his head in his hands. What had Sharon thought? What had she done?
It took him thirty seconds to check through the apartment and confirm his fears. Tony’s favourite blanket and toys were gone from his crib, Sharon’s toothbrush was gone from its puddle, and her car was not in its parking space below.
“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed and headed across the hall to Mrs. Louks. But Tony was not there. Sharon had picked him up in a great hurry two hours earlier, and although she had not said where she was going, she had been juggling a suitcase and Tony’s baby seat.
Green took a deep breath to calm himself as he returned to the apartment. It could be nothing, he tried to tell himself. She had said earlier that she wanted to let him sleep in peace. It was a beautiful sunny day; maybe she had taken the baby to the beach or on a picnic, and she would be back in a few hours, teasing him about his panic. In the meantime, worrying was not going to get Jules and Lynch and the whole damn press corps off his back. Solving the case would.
Trying to be an optimist, he wrote her a big note: “Darling, I’m at work. Please call me. Thanks and love always”, and left for the university to meet Dr. Baker, bypassing the police station and the clamour of the squad room. If no one saw him, no one could demand an explanation for the tie.
He found the little round professor hunched over a computer staring at an array of columns on the screen. His assistant Melanie sat cross-legged on the floor, poring over numbers. Baker’s eyes were bloodshot and his thinning hair stood on end. He gazed at Green as if he were an apparition from another galaxy.
“What have you got for us, professor?”
Baker shook his head slowly back and forth. “These numbers. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“Well, that’s your ballpark, not mine. Are you ready to give me a report?”
Baker stared at the screen, then flipped through a stack of computer print-outs, pausing now and then to peer at something. For a long while he said nothing. Green was beginning to think the man had forgotten his presence, when he suddenly slammed his books shut and stood up.
“Yes. Let’s get a cup of coffee.”
Leaving Melanie to her perusal of the numbers, they went down to the little sidewalk café.
“We’ll have to talk fast,” Green began. “The brass is hounding me.”
“Do you want the long answer or the short answer?” Baker asked, a large muffin poised at his lips.
“The short one for now.”
“David Miller is your culprit.”
Green whistled. “So the data does support Difalco’s work?”
Baker put the muffin down. “You want the long answer now?”
“Isn’t there a simple yes or no to that?”
“Yes, there is. It’s yes. The data does support Difalco’s work. All Jonathan Blair’s findings are consistent with Difalco’s. Blair had concluded the same thing the day before he died.”
“Then how come there’s a long answer?”
“Well…” Baker finally crammed the muffin into his mouth, and Green had to wait while he chewed. “You’ve got to admire Miller’s work. He’s a genius. He’s head and shoulders above most people. I couldn’t figure out how he generated the simulation of Difalco’s work and managed to make his numbers fit the way he wanted.” He licked crumbs from his fingers. “There’s a new book from a cognitive neuroscience conference in Denmark that I want to check, but I’ve had to order it up from McGill. The University of Ottawa library says their copy is signed out to: guess who? Our guy Miller.”
The professor looked as if he had single-handedly uncovered the key to the mystery. Green frowned warily. “What’s odd about that? Miller is doing research in the field.”
“But the timing! The coincidence—a new book out, and he’s got it. It’s highly suspicious, don’t you think? Plus, I’ve tried calling him to borrow the book, and he’s not returning my calls. I’ll bet he used that book to help with his simulations.”
Melanie and the thousand dollars a day notwithstanding, Professor Baker was clearly relishing his role as computer sleuth. His eyes danced as his imagination took flight. Green cast about for some gentle brakes. “I thought you said he faked them.”
“He must have, but how?” Reverence mixed with determination on Baker’s face. A man not unlike myself, Green thought, fascinated by the mystery of facts. “It’s so damn clever, so well hidden. Just a couple of small changes in the algorithm, like a weighting factor here or a regression sequence there, and it throws Difalco’s data off completely. But the real beauty of it is that Miller’s own research data fit together properly too. He could have fooled Halton, me— hell, the whole scientific community! He would have been the one to go to Yale on a research fellowship, and no one would have known he was a fake. If Difalco hadn’t stuck up for himself, and if Halton hadn’t asked Blair to do an independent replication…”
“Blair wouldn’t be dead.”
Baker blinked. “Well, yes, there’s that. But evoked potential word processing research might have gone off in the wrong direction for years. That’s the point. Miller’s that convincing.” He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t envy Myles the job of cleaning up this mess.”
“He fired Miller already.”
“Well, yes, but Myles was supposed to present this research in Stockholm next month, and this is going to be a major blow to his credibility. Plus, Yale won’t want to touch him with a ten-foot pole now. It’s going to be a long while before his work is credible again.”
“Was it credible before?”
“Oh very. And potentially very useful too, which of course was what he wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
Baker seemed to hesitate as if he had overstepped his bounds, then reached for another muffin. “Well, you know we are often influenced in our choice of career by personal problems. Wilder Penfield, the great pioneer in brain surgery, had a sister with epilepsy. Halton has a son in an institution, brain-damaged from birth. Myles was a graduate student at Berkeley at the time.”
Green masked his surprise. “I only knew about the two daughters.”
Baker shook his head as he chewed. “He never talks about it. Some deep dark secret, I gather. But it’s his driving force, so to speak. That and, let’s face it, he’s ambitious as hell.”