“I got a call.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was from downstairs. That wasn’t me in the speaker-phone before. Someone recorded my voice.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“Someone was here?’”
“They’re not here now, though,” said Hazel. “It’s okay now.”
Martha shook her head angrily and walked back into the living room. She sat heavily back onto the sofa. “Do you mean to say you keep track of my every move, imagining all kinds of harm coming to me, living in worry for me, but you didn’t know some creep with a recording of your voice might be paying me a visit?”
Hazel holstered the gun and sat across from Martha, unsure what to tell her. “It’s a live investigation, Martha. I had no idea it was even a possibility. Your dad’s name is on the lease, your number is unlisted. We did all that for a reason.”
“What was that reason again, Mum? Do you think all cops’ kids live in witness protection or something?”
“It was just a thought for your safety.”
“You would never have felt the need to do the same thing for Emilia.”
She’d come here worried for her daughter’s life and now, without so much as the wind changing, they were in familiar territory where Hazel couldn’t save Martha from anything. “I’m sorry,” she said now. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“So now what?”
“I think maybe you should come back home until all this is wrapped up.”
“No fucking way.”
“Martha -”
“I’m thirty-three,” her daughter said. “This is my home. How about I stay here and if it sounds like you’re downstairs, I’ll just pretend I’m not home.”
“Please, Martha.”
Her daughter said nothing. After a moment, the intercom buzzed and Martha blinked twice without moving. “You want to answer that or just shoot it?”
Hazel spiked the call button on the intercom. “Who is it?”
“I’m here,” said Wingate.
“We’ll be down in a minute,” she said. She disconnected and took Martha’s coat off the hook by the door. “I know how pissed off you are at me right now, but I have to insist. I don’t know if you’re safe here.”
After a moment, Martha pushed herself up from the couch, exactly the same gesture Hazel could see in her mind’s eye when, as a teenager, Martha had finally acquiesced to a higher power and reluctantly taken direction. She came to her mother and took the coat from her, lifted it into the air, and put it back on its hook.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said.
“Do you want to know who was here, Martha?” she said, finally furious. “He was a cop once, and right now he’s got a man tied to a chair in a basement somewhere. Although not all of the man. He cut his hand off and sent it to me in a box and then he sliced the man’s ears from the sides of his head and painted a wall with them.” Martha was blanching. “So it’s your choice: put on that fucking coat and come downstairs with me now, or keep your apartment locked up tight and hope he doesn’t know how to kick in a door.”
She told Wingate to take his time going down Broadview, she’d had enough fast living for one day. Martha sat in the back seat, looking out the window in silence.
Wingate spoke quietly. “What the hell happened back there?”
“Goodman happened. But I had her…”
“Who?”
“Joanne Cameron. She was at the house. She gave me this.” She held up the sweater in the evidence bag. “Then Goodman called from the bottom of Martha’s building.”
“Jesus.”
“We have to move quickly now. With the both of them down here – I don’t know what he might do next.”
“That’s the sweater from the picture?”
“Supposedly it proves that Colin Eldwin killed Brenda Cameron.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you something: we lucked out with Toles. He’s not the sharpest biscuit in the tin and he’s probably the only guy at Twenty-one who doesn’t know that Goodman made detective and then went berserk. We have to keep it quiet, but if we can get him to handle the sweater for us, we might have some new evidence we can go to the superintendent with.”
“You sound like you’re onside now, Hazel.”
“I’m getting close. Joanne Cameron is consumed by grief, but Goodman hasn’t put a foot wrong since he sank that mannequin in Gannon. Everything he’s done has been considered and carefully executed. I don’t like him, but he’s too smart to be a loose cannon and if he’s spent three years looking for someone to bring this to Twenty-one’s doorstep again…”
“What? We owe it to him to carry it over the goal line?”
“No,” said Hazel. “We owe it to Joanne Cameron. This woman has lost everything. She deserves an answer.”
“She got her answer, Hazel. If you’re right, he convinced her to disregard it and if she did, that was her decision. Why is it our problem?”
“Because we caught the case, James. And we should see it through.”
“If this is as you say, we’re not going to be welcome at Twenty-one much longer.”
“That’s why we need Toles onside and Ilunga in the dark.”
27
They drove to the bus terminal on Bay Street and Hazel bought Martha a one-way ticket to Port Dundas. Her daughter didn’t argue at all. “I’ll call your father to pick you up,” she said. “He’ll be happy to see you.”
“What makes you think this guy won’t show up in Port Dundas?”
“He’s not leaving Toronto while I’m still here.”
“How does he know you’re still here?”
“He just does,” she said.
They waited until the bus moved out onto Edward Street and made its turn south toward the expressway. “Let’s see if Toles feels like having a coffee,” she said.
Toles met them in the Tim’s. He’d brought Lana Baichwell’s file, like she asked him to. “You been here the whole time?” he asked. “I didn’t realize you guys were from Quebec,” he said, smiling.
“Uhh?” said Hazel.
“A two-hour lunch? I just figure you must be French.”
“Well, actually,” said Hazel, “something interesting came up.” She lowered her voice. “I think we found our girl.”
Toles reached carefully into a small black portfolio and drew out the file. “This one, eh?”
Hazel took the file and opened it. “She went over the side of the Ongiara on July 10, 2002. We’ve come across some evidence that she might have been pushed.”
“Really. Like what?”
She nodded to Wingate, who produced the sweater. She took it from him and handed it over to Toles. “We can’t talk about our source yet, but if you can get that down to your lab and there’s the wood or varnish we expect to find on it, then I think we’re going to want to establish some kind of joint force to carry forward. And you’re already attached, Detective.”
“I hear you.”