“She must have been crushed.”
Cameron ignored her. “It got bad enough that he broke up with her, finally. I guess even Colin Eldwin had his standards.”
Hazel had picked up the radiophone and moved into the dining room. She imagined candles on a table set for two. “Get to the night in question,” she said. “How do you know she was here?”
“He broke up with her in July, but she wouldn’t stay away. She had other troubles and they were clouding her judgment.”
“Drugs?”
“She’d been clean since the previous fall, but she started back on crack and she was unravelling. She showed up at my place a few times talking about how they were going to get back together, how she had a plan. He just needed her to show him the way back, she said. The night of August second, she was with me before she went to him.”
“And?”
“She said she was pregnant.”
Unbidden, the dead girl with the knifed fetus swam into Hazel’s mind. But she knew Brenda Cameron had not been pregnant.
“Said it was the sign she was waiting for. She was going over to tell him the good news.”
“She wasn’t pregnant, Joanne. I saw the report this morning, remember?”
“I know she wasn’t pregnant.”
“The members of your family stop at nothing to get what they want, do they?”
“She’s at the door,” she said quietly. “It’s about ten o’clock at night on August second. She knocks, calls his name.”
Hazel’s heart was thrashing now. She heard nothing, but when she turned to look back into the living room, she saw them in her mind’s eye, Brenda Cameron walking into the apartment, Eldwin standing there, his arms crossed. She asks him if he’s alone. He tells her she has to stop this, it’s over, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. She puts a hand on his arm, slides it down to his wrist, and puts his palm against her belly.
“We can’t know any of this,” Hazel said. “There were no witnesses to what they said to each other. To what happened here, if anything happened here. Just because you saw her and she told you she was coming to this house, it doesn’t mean she did. She might have gone straight to the ferry docks.”
“But she didn’t. She came here.”
“Fine. And then she killed herself. Whatever happened here that night drove her to it.”
“He drugged her. He knocked her out and dragged her across the floor. He took her out to his car -”
“No, Joanne,” Hazel said. “I know you want that to be true, but all of this is a figment of your grief. You and Dean Bellocque have abducted and wronged a man you want to be guilty of murdering your daughter. Have you thought about what it means if you’re wrong? Have you thought about what you’ve done?”
“I know what I’ve done.”
“I want to know where Colin Eld -” She stopped mid-sentence. She realized the last thing she’d heard had not come from the device she held in her hand. She looked down at it and saw the call had been disconnected.
From behind her, Cameron said, “There was a witness.”
26
Hazel dropped the phone and, in one motion, freed her gun from its holster and spun, weapon extended. Joanne Cameron was standing in the living room, the light from the closed venetians spreading in a bright fan around her body. She hadn’t flinched. Standing before her now, Cameron only faintly resembled that confident woman who’d shown up at her office one week ago. She looked smaller, her clothes hung off her, and her smart bead necklace looked cheap. She was holding a large white plastic bag with something inside weighing it down. Hazel’s eyes flicked between Cameron’s face and the bag. “Step back, Joanne,” she said. “Back away.”
Cameron ignored her and reached into the bag. Hazel decided if she brought out Eldwin’s head she was going to shoot her on the spot. But she removed an official evidence bag and Hazel knew right away what was in it and who had given it to her.
“She was wearing this the night she was killed,” Cameron said, holding out the bag with the black sweater in it. “There are bits of wood in it, and varnish. It was all in the lab report, but they ignored it.”
“I told you to back away.”
“Why would they ignore evidence?”
“There was no lab report on the sweater, Joanne. No report and no mention of it in the inventory of documents. I saw it all just an hour ago. It showed, definitively, that your daughter drowned herself. There was no struggle, no witnesses on the island who heard any cries for help, nothing that points to anything apart from a girl who wanted to end it all. You said it yourself: she went up and down, she hoped and she despaired. It doesn’t always end well for people like Brenda, Joanne. You have to accept that.”
Cameron was smiling sadly. “There’s a lab report. It was done afterwards. But they wouldn’t reopen the case.”
Hazel hesitated a moment and then lowered the gun and put it back in the holster. She took a step toward Cameron and gently slipped out a necklace tucked into her shirt. It was a lamb dangling from a leather cord. “He couldn’t save Brenda with this,” Hazel said, looking at the talisman with a heavy heart. “What makes you think it can save you?”
“Do you have children, Detective Inspector?”
“Joanne, that has nothing -”
“He dragged my child across the floor. This floor. The varnish, the wood fragments are embedded in the sweater, not just on the surface. What really happened to Brenda is written on what she wore. I still believe you want to see it for yourself.”
Hazel took the evidence bag from Cameron, who stood in front of her with her hands at her sides, empty. Her eyes had gone flat, like someone had turned the lights off in a room, and Hazel realized that this was it, this was as far as Cameron could come on her own and it had cost her everything.
“I’m going to call my partner now, Joanne, and he’s going to come and get us.” She held the evidence bag up between them. “And I’ll take care of this. I’ll bring it to the police lab, I’m willing to do that for you. But it’s all over now, you understand that, right?”
“Yes,” said Cameron quietly. “I do.”
“You’re going to come in and help us put an end to all of this, Joanne.”
She held her radiophone up. “I’m supposed to call at one.”
Hazel looked at her watch: it was five past. “Well, let’s not keep him waiting then. Dial his number. But I’ll do the talking.”
Cameron dialled a number and passed the device to Hazel. She held it to her ear and heard it ringing. “Joanne?” came the voice on the other end.
“Hello, Detective,” Hazel said. “Although I’m ashamed to call you that.”
“Ah,” said Dana Goodman. “How nice to hear from you.”
“Where are you?”
“That’s not important right now. I want to tell you, Detective Inspector, how pleased I am. You’ve done a good job. Now I hope you’ll finish what you’ve started.”
“I’m not doing anything while you still have Colin Eldwin. You tell us where he is, give yourself up, and I’ll do whatever I think is warranted. But right now, I have your evidence in my hands as well as your accomplice – who’s a wreck, thanks to your hard work – so how about you do what I ask before you make things worse for everyone?”
“How about,” he said, and he hemmed like he was trying to work things out, “… yes… how about you dust our friend off and send her on her way and then do what you’re told? How about that?”