The Mobile Command Post was gone, but a squad car was still parked on the square outside Ashford Methodist Church. The patrol officer guarding the scene was nowhere in sight, however, and the heavy oak door to the church was still padlocked shut. Carrying the evidence bags containing the contents of Lawrence’s tin can, Green ducked under the yellow police tape and mounted the stone steps to the door. Brown leaves had accumulated along the base of the door, and an intricate network of spider webs clung to the corners. No one had opened this door in a long time.
As a precaution, he slipped on nitryl gloves before stooping to examine the lock with his magnifying glass. Rust had caked around the hole, suggesting no one had tried to insert a key in quite some months. But the size of the hole looked about right. He took the brass key from its evidence bag and inserted it into the keyhole. It was stiff and balky, but with some gentle coaxing, he was able to work it in all the way. He was about to turn it when he heard a shout.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He spun around and spotted a uniformed constable striding around the corner of the bell tower, bunching a stream of discarded yellow tape in his hands and scowling at Green from beneath thick black brows. A cop’s scowl, honed to intimidate and control. When Green identified himself with his badge, the scowl rapidly gave way to alarm.
“Sorry, sir. I thought everyone was finished here.”
“Where the hell were you?” Green countered. “This scene is supposed to be secure.”
“Ident released it this afternoon, sir. I was just clearing things up.” The young man’s forehead puckered. “Is that a problem, sir?”
Green shook his head. Cunningham was as obsessive and meticulous a forensics specialist as Green had ever encountered. He and his partner had had two days to process the scene and if Cunningham said they were done, they were done. Besides, that meant Green could finally prowl around all he wanted.
Green hastened to reassure the officer before dispatching him to continue his clean-up. Once the officer had disappeared back around the bell tower, Green returned his attention to the key in the padlock. The mechanism was badly rusted, and for a few moments the key wouldn’t budge, but finally, with one strong twist, the lock clicked open. As Green unhooked the padlock and slowly pulled open the door, a wave of cold, musty air rushed over him.
He stepped through into the interior, rendered dank and gloomy by the boarded windows. Slivers of sunlight pierced through the cracks and cut shafts through the dusty air. There was a small ante-chamber with a table and a door off to the right, presumably to the bell tower. Beyond the ante-chamber, the church opened into a rectangular sanctuary with a vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by thick, black beams. Green’s footsteps echoed on the stone floor as he walked the length of the interior. It had been stripped bare of furnishings except for a black wood stove sitting in the corner with an empty wood box beside it and a rusty axe propped against the wall. Over the altar hung a plain wooden cross. Green stood a moment before the altar, trying to picture the room full of pews and people, with the mischievous Reverend Taylor ministering to his flock and the Pettigrew family swaying happily to the hymns.
Green turned slowly in place. Lawrence had the key to this church in his treasure chest. Stolen, or freely lent? Reverend Taylor had a soft spot for society’s lost souls. Perhaps it was the key Lawrence was searching for in the Boisvert yard that morning. But since he’d been scared away before finding it, then how had he gained access to the church?
The lure of the unanswered questions—the how and why— drew Green like a magnet. He walked back through the sanctuary towards the bell tower, trying to gather the few fragments he’d learned about Lawrence into some form of understanding. He needed to get inside the man’s head, to see those last few moments of his life as Lawrence had seen them. But as Green entered the tower, he sucked in his breath with dismay. Dim daylight slipped in through the arched openings where the cast-iron bell hung, but otherwise the tower was dark. Fastened to the interior stone wall was a metal ladder which reached up past the massive bell to a trap door above. The climb was probably thirty feet; to Green it looked like a hundred.
Just contemplating it made him dizzy. He’d hated heights ever since his childhood, when his friends had made a game of chasing each other up the rickety fire escapes and over the tenement rooftops of Lowertown. He’d slipped, breaking his collarbone and subjecting himself to weeks of painful immobility. Now his palms turned slick and his legs jellied as he gripped the bars. The silence was broken only by the cooing of pigeons up above and the pulse of his own heartbeat in his ears. He was so alone. Surely, it was unwise to make the climb with no one there to get help should he fall, or should the ladder break away from its rusty anchors and crash to the ground.
He shook the bars to test the ladder’s stability. Flakes of debris floated down, but the ladder was rock solid. “Coward,” he muttered aloud, and the curse echoed around him. If the Ident team could go up and down the ladder half a dozen times, then so could he.
Gingerly, he planted his foot on the bottom rung and began his ascent. He kept his body pressed to the wall and his eyes fixed on the stones in front of him, forcing his feet to follow one step after another. Soon he was level with the old bell, which hung motionless in the fading light. Lawrence might have found this seclusion comforting, but when the bell rang it would have been deafening inside this small space.
Green raised his eyes to the trap door and felt his stomach churn. He would have to hold on with one hand and pry open the door with the other. Fear hammered in his ears as he forced himself upwards. The platform above was wooden but supported on all sides by a small stone ledge. Glued to the wall, he groped overhead to feel the contours of the door, found the hinge, the opposite edge, the slight gap where the door abutted the floor. He pushed. Nothing. The goddamn door weighed a ton. He gritted his teeth, leaned into it and pushed again. It lifted six inches before slamming back down with such force it nearly knocked him off the ladder. He clutched the bars, gasping for breath. What the fuck am I doing, he thought. I’m not some muscle-bound farmer used to tossing bales of hay into the barn. I’m a pencil pusher, for God’s sake. Much as I hate it, much as I mock it, I spend most of my days on the phone or on my ass in a committee room chair. Even when I was a kid, my idea of serious exercise was jumping my bike over the potholes on Nelson Avenue.
But I’m here. I’ve come this far and going down will be even worse than going up. If I go up one more step so I can get my shoulders and back behind the push, maybe I can work a miracle.
He pushed, grunted, pried and slowly forced the door up far enough to wedge it open with the stick that had obviously been left inside for that purpose. Not daring to look down, he crawled through the opening and rolled over onto the roof.
Late afternoon sun nearly blinded him. He lay on his back, blinking at the blue sky and thanking God for the feel of solid wood beneath him. On all sides, the stone parapet was covered with lichen and stained with a century of bird droppings. He stood up in disgust, wiping the stains off his jacket as he surveyed the scene.
The stone wall rose to about hip level, affording a sense of both security and privacy. Down below him on one side lay the village square, the cars catching the sunlight as they cruised down the main road. On the other side stretched a view of golden trees and vast fields bisected by the river. In the distance, if he looked hard, he could just make out the reddish smudge of the Boisvert’s old farmhouse. A person could stand here virtually unseen, divorced from the world below and yet witness to it all. A spymaster’s dream.
Here the teenage Lawrence could have sat in isolation, safety and peace. At the top of God’s house, in the palm of God’s hand. Here, sharing this private spot with his favourite feathered creatures, his angels of God, he could have spied on the world, seen who went where in the village, who came and went through the oak door below.
He would have felt all-knowing, all-powerful. Perhaps even messianic.
Was that what had lured him back all these years later? Not a girl but a yearning to reconnect with his spiritual past, to capture once more the power and inspiration that this special place had given him in his troubled youth? Perhaps when he first left Brockville six weeks ago, he had simply wanted to come home, but as his medication wore off and his delusions gained hold, had he remembered this sanctuary, where he communed with the angels and talked directly to his God? Perhaps he hadn’t been looking for the old love notes at all when Isabelle Boisvert spotted him, but for the antique key that would get him back in here.
A century of ice and rain had gouged deep cracks in the wall. Green examined the spot where the top had crumbled. MacPhail was right; a mere few inches had broken away, hardly enough to cause an accidental fall. Furthermore, anyone trying to force a person over the wall would have a major task lifting them over the lip and preventing them from scratching and kicking everything within sight. Yet there were no signs of a struggle. The lichen was nearly undisturbed, and many loose pieces of stone were still in place.
It looked as if Lawrence’s jump had been intentional, and Green felt a wave of sorrow for the man. What had happened? Had God failed to come to him? Had he suddenly realized the futility of it all? Twenty years later, looking not through the rosy lens of an impressionable, delusional teenager but through the dimmed lens of a burned out schizophrenic, had he realized he would never hear God, and that his angels were nothing more than pigeons pecking out a pointless existence on a smelly little roof?
A pigeon swooped in, landed on the wall opposite him and fixed him with beady eyes. Green watched it a moment, wondering if Lawrence had seen it that afternoon, read meaning into its random pecking at the lichen and into its frankly hostile stare. Then the bird shook its wings, gave a soft coo and lifted off again, sailing high above the square.
Green tracked it until it was nothing but a white speck over the distant trees. Such freedom. Had Lawrence watched it fly away, felt the tug of freedom as Green had. What was it the St. Lawrence supervisor had said? That after twenty years in hospital, several hundred electroshocks, and a ton of mind-numbing drugs, Lawrence had very few brain cells left? Had he thought, in his primitive, child-like way, that he could fly free like the birds? Spread his imaginary wings and fly straight up to heaven?
The sun dipped below the horizon, sapping the warmth from the air and bringing Green back to reality with a jolt. He reached out his hand to steady himself. Shook his head incredulously at his own folly. What was it about this place that unleashed such spiritual ravings? He was an investigator, not a psychic trying to communicate with the dead. This was a crime scene, not a seance.
Green leaned over the edge of the wall and peered cautiously down at the spot where Lawrence had fallen. The grass all around had been trampled, and blood still stained the stones. He remembered the photo of the body splayed in the grass, and now, looking down from above, he realized something was odd. Why would the head be facing the tower rather than out? If Lawrence had jumped of his own accord, he should have fallen feet first and pitched forward so that his head was facing out. To have landed face down with his head towards the tower, he would have had to twist in mid flight. Green had never known a jumper to do that.
As he leaned over, the rough surface of the wall scraped his suit. He backed away, brushing mortar dust and lichen from the front of his jacket. At once, another inconsistency struck, him. The back of Lawrence’s jacket had snagged on the inner edge of the wall. But if Lawrence had been preparing to jump, he would probably have stood facing outward to clamber up onto the wall, in which case he’d be more likely to snag the front hem of his jacket rather than the back. If he’d then swung himself over the wall and sat on the edge, perhaps gathering the courage to jump, he’d be more likely to catch the back hem on the outer edge of the wall, not the inner.
They were minuscule inconsistencies, certainly not enough to dispute the suicide idea altogether. It was possible the man had hoisted himself backwards over the wall, or that his back hem had draped over the entire top of the wall as he slid off the edge. But there was a much more obvious way the back hem of his jacket could have snagged on the inner edge of the wall. If the man had his back to the wall and had pressed hard against it. Perhaps been pushed with enough force to rip the fabric.
They were very thin threads on which to hang a murder theory. But as long as they were there, he owed it to Lawrence to follow it through. After he returned the tin can to the evidence room, he’d get all the latest intelligence from the troops, and he’d go home to Sharon.
Now more than ever, he needed her sane, experienced understanding of the deranged mind.
When Green finally made it back downtown, it was past six. He dropped into the forensics lab in the hope of finding Cunningham still at work over his fingerprint files, but there was no one there. He tagged Lawrence’s tin can back into the evidence room and left a requisition for Cunningham to fingerprint every item in it and to send the reddish stain to the RCMP lab for analysis. Any fingerprints and blood were to be matched to the dead man. Another small step towards unravelling the mystery, thought Green as he prepared to go home.
One final minor detour, he promised himself as he made his way up to his office. Just to see what the troops have uncovered. Both Gibbs and Sullivan had gone home, but their email updates were waiting for him, along with Dr. MacPhail’s preliminary findings from the post mortem. Gibbs reported, with his usual apologies, that he was still waiting for word on Tom Pettigrew from the Toronto officer who’d released him, and that he had no useful leads on Derek’s disappearance. Berkeley, California, had responded snippily that according to its archived records Derek Pettigrew had been accepted but hadn’t registered in his program. To date, all other avenues that Gibbs had explored proved to be dead ends.
Physical examination of the victim’s body during the post mortem had revealed no signs of bruising suggestive of coercion or struggling, and although a lot of dirt had been extracted from beneath his fingernails, none had been identified as human tissue. It did not appear as if Lawrence had put up any resistance. Based on the condition of the victim’s brain on autopsy, MacPhail refined his estimate on the timing of his death. Death had been caused by extensive intra cranial bleeding due to the trauma sustained in the fall, but that amount of bleeding would likely have taken four hours, give or take. Death most likely occurred between six p.m. and midnight, but the fall probably between two and seven p.m.
Still a big window of time, Green thought, but at least a time when people would have been out in the village, walking their dogs, playing ball or attending Sunday services at the other two churches. It was worth another canvass of the village, with a focus on that time span. Sullivan’s email expressed the very same thought. Inquiries would resume in the morning.
A later email from Sullivan, logged shortly before five o’clock, reported that the St. Lawrence group home supervisor had been unable to make a positive ID from the dead man’s photo. Mrs. Hogencamp thought it could be Lawrence, but she didn’t recognize the clothes, and on a matter as crucial as a man’s death, she was not willing to commit herself. Green flipped through his notebook for the supervisor’s number. As he reached for the phone, he glanced at his watch. Nearly seven o’clock. Sharon would have long since given up waiting for him and would have fed herself and the children dinner, assuming she had a kitchen in which to prepare it. Bob had skipped yesterday, leaving both fridge and stove in the middle of the floor, but had returned with a vengeance this morning, bringing a crew of four and a truck full of cabinets. A promising sign, Green had thought at the time.
His fingers hovered over the phone pad. He ought to call Sharon first to show his support. When you have a toddler entering the terrible twos, a teenager who’d never left them, a massive mutt and a kitchen in non-functional shambles, you do not need a spouse who stays out well past the family witching hour without so much as a call. To drive her point home, Sharon had done it to him a few times. Empathy was not always his strong suit, but he’d got the hint eventually.
Sharon’s tone when she answered told him he’d done the wise thing. She sounded perilously close to murdering someone. Bob, perhaps, whose hammering could still be heard in the background.
“Yeah, he’s still here,” she said. “Or rather he’s here again. The hinges he brought this morning were all the wrong size, so he had to go back for new ones.” There was a slight pause. “You’re not still at the station, are you?”
“Listen,” he said hastily. “Why don’t you pile everyone in the car—well, except Bob and Modo—and meet me at Swiss Chalet in half an hour. Sounds like we can’t inhabit the kitchen anyway.”
“Hannah’s not going to like that. Chickens once breathed, you know.”
“Then she can stay with Bob and Modo. Come on. Nice, succulent, barbequed chicken and ribs combo, fries drenched in sauce...”
She surrendered and hung up even before he’d finished his pitch. Laughing, he returned to the task at hand.
The St. Lawrence group home supervisor sounded relieved when her co-workers managed to track her down and put her on the line. “I’ve been thinking about that photo all day,” she explained. “It was so unreal looking. It’s not just that I want Lawrence to be alive, but I want to be sure.”
“We wouldn’t rely solely on your impression, Mrs. Hogencamp—”
“Please, Angie.” The name took him aback. Neither the name nor her anxious tone went with the two-pack-a-day, world weary cynic he’d pictured. He relinquished some of his formality. “I know it’s a hard call, Angie. We’d bring one of your staff up to identify the actual body, but before we put any of you through that, we’d like to be reasonably certain. What did you think?”
“The man in the photo had a beard and longer hair. Lawrence is clean-shaven, and he is heavier. His face is rounder.”
“But you haven’t seen him in over six weeks. In that time, he could grow a beard and longer hair, and he could easily lose ten pounds, especially if he was on the streets.”
“I know. That’s why I’m saying I just can’t be certain.”
“All right, what about his clothes? The brown cords don’t ring a bell?”
“That I’m sure of. The last time I saw him it was summer. All summer he wore the same khaki pants and white T-shirt. If it was cool he’d put on a navy windbreaker. He’s had the same clothes for years. We’d practically have to tear them off him to wash them. So when he moved out of hospital, I helped him buy a whole bunch exactly the same—half a dozen white T-shirts and khaki pants. Lawrence is very set in his ways. Don’t try throwing him a curve ball, he doesn’t cope.”
Green thought back. The dead man had been wearing a T-shirt blackened by grime and newspaper ink but conceivably white in its former days. However, it was a thin thread to hang an ID on.
“What about personal effects and accessories? Any watches, rings...jewellery?”
“Oh, he has a crucifix.”
Bingo, Green thought, asking her to describe it.
“It’s an ornate gold cross on a chain. It’s not his,” she added quickly. “It’s apparently his older brother’s, but he’s had it since he first arrived at the hospital. He loves that thing, wears it night and day. Never lets it out of his sight.”
“Do you know how he came by it?”
“The family didn’t say, if I recall. They just said that anybody who tries to take it away from him had better watch out.”
It was ten o’clock that evening before Green finally had the chance to catch Sharon alone. He returned from walking Modo to find her sprawled in his old vinyl easy chair in the living room, with her feet propped on the coffee table and her eyes closed. She looked done in. The house was quiet, Tony asleep and Hannah closeted in her bedroom with her music miraculously turned down low. Only the bass beat pulsed through the ceiling.
Modo padded into the living room to flop down in her usual spot at Sharon’s feet. Even that did not rouse her. Green vacillated in the doorway, loathe to disturb her, when he saw a faint smile curve the corners of her mouth.
“Okay, Green,” she said without opening her eyes. “Fix me a cup of tea, and I’ll listen.”
He hesitated, wondering what had given him away. She regarded him through eyes at half mast. “You have that look in your eye—Detective Green on the scent. What is it you want to know?”
Humbly, he went into their ravaged kitchen, found the kettle and brewed up a pot of Sharon’s favourite Darjeeling brand.
“Don’t forget to scald the pot,” she called from her chair. O ye of little faith, he thought. After five years of her exacting tutelage, he knew how to make a perfect cup of tea. When he brought it to her, complete with a saucer and oatmeal cookie, she took a sip and grinned at him.
“Just keeping you on your toes. Okay, I probably have about half an hour of consciousness left, so shoot.”
Cradling his tea, he sat on the chesterfield opposite her, propped his feet next to hers on the coffee table and summarized the case. Even though her eyes were closed, he knew she was absorbing every word.
“I’m not ruling out homicide, because that piece of jacket bothers me,” he said as he finished. “But everything points to suicide. We have no signs of a struggle—no blood or disturbance up on the top. No defensive wounds, no abrasions on his hands to suggest he even grabbed at the wall to stop himself from falling. No witnesses to anyone else being in the area at the time. MacPhail’s pretty sure it’s suicide. Even Cunningham, who likes every minutia of physical evidence to fit, thinks it’s suicide. Lawrence’s group home supervisor says he hadn’t much to live for. And with his crazy delusions, he could have been thinking anything.”
“So what do you want me to do?” she murmured. “Add my guess to the others?”
He was about to protest, but stopped himself. “You’ve worked with schizophrenics for years. I want you to help me understand this guy. Would he be likely to kill himself, and if so, why? Or could he be so crazy that he’d jump off, thinking he could fly?”
Her eyes were still closed, but a smile crept across her face. “That’s what I love about you. You don’t ask much. As to your first question, the answer is yes. Schizophrenics kill themselves all the time. It’s a devastating disease that robs both its victims and their families of normal, happy lives. It torments them with voices, fears and obsessions they can’t escape. Sometimes they make a very lucid choice to end it all.”
“But I thought there are medications nowadays.”
“Modern psychiatry has made amazing strides in treating this disease, at least to improve the quality of life, especially if it’s caught early. But in his case, after all these years of illness, what the disease hasn’t destroyed of his mind, our more primitive treatments probably have. Besides, you said he was off his meds, so he’d already be falling back into the grip of his delusions.”
“In which case he might not realize the consequences of his jump? He might think he was immortal?”
“Given the place he chose for his jump, I’d say that’s as good a possibility as the other.” She opened her eyes to take a sip of her tea. His exasperation must have shown, for she wiggled her toes to stroke his foot, the only exertion she could manage. “I know you want to understand why he jumped. That’s what I love about you. That driving force to solve the riddle of a case, to untangle people’s lives. But we will never be able to get inside his head that much.”
“I suppose. Still, it helps to know that, psychologically, suicide is possible. Even likely.” He ceded the point reluctantly. “Much more likely than murder, twenty years later when his family had all moved away, and no one even knew he was in town.”
She nodded, emitting an appreciative sigh as she took another sip. “There is an in-between possibility, you know. If he suffered from paranoid delusions, he might believe others were out to get him. Instruments of the devil, or something. I had a patient once who genuinely believed I was a witch, and she was terrified of me.” She shivered. “That was scary.”
He leaned forward, his own tea forgotten. “So what’s your in-between theory?”
“Well, simply that something scared him so much he jumped off the tower to escape.”
“Something? You mean someone.” His thoughts were racing back to the crime scene, to the scrap of fabric on the wrong side of the wall.
“Who knows? Perhaps something he saw—or someone— triggered his fear. Or perhaps it was all just a hallucination. Remember, by this time he was getting pretty sick.”
Green struggled through fatigue to grapple with the elusive speculations she was tossing out. So much hinged on Lawrence’s mental state, but as Sharon said, no one could ever really know that. He grabbed onto the facts he had. “But his group home supervisor said with the meds he’d been on, he might still be in fairly good shape.”
She shook her head dubiously. “In good shape for him, honey. But some schizophrenics are hit worse than others, and he sounds like one of the sicker ones. His illness struck him early in his teens—a bad sign—and he had to have electroshock, which is a drastic treatment normally used as a last resort. Plus it’s unusual for St. Lawrence to keep someone hospitalized for almost twenty years. He’d have to be resistant to almost all the treatments they tried, and they had to think he presented a serious ongoing risk.”
“Risk to what?”
“To himself. Or to others.”
“What if his parents just didn’t want him to ever get out?”
She shook her head. “You know as well as I do that they don’t have that power. Especially before Brian’s Law came out in 2000. Lawrence couldn’t have been held indefinitely against his wishes.”
Green himself had been a detective on the major crimes squad when popular Ottawa sports broadcaster Brian Smith had been shot dead by a schizophrenic who had refused treatment. The outrage of the community had spilled into the legislature as well, making it easier for doctors to force treatment on those without the power to judge wisely for themselves. But it was still a difficult feat unless the patient consented.
“What if he wanted to be kept in too?”
“He’d still have to be pretty sick, Mike. A lot of patients are afraid to leave hospital because it’s the only home they know. But part of the staff ’s job is to help them get ready.”
He pondered the situation. The vague, uneasy feeling he’d had earlier after discussing the past with Sandy and his mother began to crystallize. “What if he did something really horrific?”
“He’d have gone to a forensic facility.”
“Only if people found out.” He sat forward excitedly. “Bear with me, honey. See if you see the same thing I do.” He picked up a set of Tony’s playing cards from the table and began to talk, laying them down, one for each point, as if arraying his forces.
“First we have the father lecturing about Satan and using the strap to drive evil out of his boys’ lives. Second, we have at least two older brothers engaging in sex and other sins. Third, we have a boy spying on his brothers and believing he’s the agent of God’s will. Fourth, we have this same sick boy believing he can purify souls by bizarre blood rituals. And finally, we have a brother who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. You add to all this the fact that the family put Lawrence away for good, they burned down the shed he loved, they threw out all his things, the father and brother became drunks, and the mother killed herself.”
By the end, Sharon was sitting straight up, wide awake. “Something horrific, you said. What, Mike? What exactly are you thinking?”
As she posed the question, Green looked at his six cards and recognized the uneasiness that had been lurking in the back of his mind. About Sophia, Derek, blood-stained notes and the jacket that was torn on the wrong place.
“I think he may have killed his brother,” he said. “And maybe somebody wanted revenge.”