Do or Die (3 page)

Sullivan led Green into the elevator and punched four. “Looks great now, doesn't it? Everything according to procedure, every ‘t' crossed. The Ident team has cordoned off the entire fourth floor, and they're probably still there.”

The elevator door slid open, revealing yellow plastic tape
across the exit. They logged in with the uniform on guard, and ducked under the tape. Ahead of them, half a dozen men were crawling around on the floor with magnifying glasses.

“Yes, they're still here.”

“And we'll probably be here till Christmas,” came a gravelly voice from behind a bookcase. An instant later the senior Identification Officer, Sergeant Lou Paquette, emerged around the corner, red-faced from crawling. “We haven't found a damn thing yet.” He peeled off his latex glove and held out his hand to Green. “Glad to see you, Mike.”

“You've got nothing?” Green echoed in dismay.

“Oh, we've got tons of shit. Fingerprints, hair, fibres, bloodstains. There's blood all over the place. The witnesses tracked it around, the paramedics tracked it around. The only thing I can't tell is if the killer tracked it around. And this is a public place. There could be fingerprints and fibres from half the city of Ottawa here. The half that doesn't have prints on file downtown.” Paquette grinned at his own attempt at humour. His mustache quivered. “I've sent a guy to collect the shoes from every fireman and paramedic who was at the scene. That'll be fun.”

Green took out his notebook. “Can you tell us anything?”

Paquette sighed and grew sober. “As far as I can tell, there was no struggle. No books were pulled down, nothing kicked out of place. It's a narrow space. It would be hard to fight without knocking the bookshelves.”

“And the young woman who found the victim heard no sound of an argument, no screams,” Sullivan added. “Libraries are pretty quiet. She would have heard a violent scuffle.”

“Did she see anything unusual that evening? Anyone suspicious or out of place?”

“Nothing that she remembered, but she was pretty shaken
up. She got covered in blood, and all she could think about was getting cleaned up. After the preliminaries, I let her go home.”

Green nodded. “We'll get to her later.”

They had walked to the far end of the library along the path Ident had laid out and now stood in front of the large, browning pool of blood where the body had been.

“The victim was stabbed once in the abdomen,” Sullivan said. “According to the emergency room surgeon, the weapon pierced the stomach and lacerated the liver, nicking an artery as it went by. It sounds like a horizontal thrust directly forward, made by a knife held at waist level.”

“I suppose nobody took photographs of the wound before they sutured it all up?”

Sullivan grinned. “You got it.”

Green looked up from his notes with a snort. “Jesus. Jules said the case needed me, but what it really needs is a goddamn miracle.”

*    *    *

The two detectives stayed at the scene another fifteen minutes reviewing the meagre forensic harvest. No murder weapon, no signs of disturbance or misplaced property, hundreds of latent fingerprints which would take days to analyze and could not be tied definitively to the murder anyway. Blood had been tracked up and down the aisle leading to the elevator as well as the two aisles on either side, but the traces were consistent with bloodstained shoes rather than with drops of falling blood. The only spilt blood was the large pool where the body had been and a fine spray of arterial blood on the bookshelf nearby.

“The perpetrator would have got blood on himself,
without a doubt,” Paquette said. “On his hand and sleeve, probably also on his shirt, pants and shoes. The body fell forward. The perpetrator would have had trouble jumping out of the way in time, especially since he was trying to pull out his knife. Some of these bloody footprints may be his, once I eliminate all the other assholes who were on the scene.”

Green sketched the scene, noting the rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which effectively blocked any overview of the area. Jonathan Blair's killer had trapped him in a remote corner, where the chances of anyone witnessing the crime were even fewer. By luck or design?

Green glanced at his watch. “Brian, I want to meet with the mother before she calls the Chief again, and I need you to tell me what else you've got. Come on, I'll buy you a coffee. I missed having mine this morning.”

Seated over two mugs of scalding coffee at Harvey's, Green mustered a smile for his weary colleague. There was no one he respected more. The two had been friends since they started together on the streets twenty years earlier, and although Green had risen further through the ranks, placing strain on the friendship in sensitive moments, he secretly considered Sullivan the better cop. The Deputy Chief was right. He, Green, was only good at detective work. Sullivan was good at everything, paperwork and organization as well as handling people and crises. And in the middle of a case, you couldn't ask for a more careful, thorough investigator.

“How did you finally identify him, by the way? You didn't get that far in your depressing tale of professional incompetence.”

“His mother called in, finally. Actually, her personal assistant called in, guy by the name of Peter Weiss. Apparently the victim was the quiet type, no wild parties, no late nights, a bookworm. Never stayed out all night. Maybe he'd have one
drink with friends after the library closed, but he was usually home by midnight. Certainly by two. So when his mother woke up at five in the morning—she's some kind of early morning freak—and saw he never came home, she heard on the early morning radio about a stabbing in the library, and she got worried. So Weiss called the station. By then Blair was dead. He died at three fifty-six a.m. without regaining consciousness. When the assistant called I was just trying to wake MacPhail and get him down to the hospital to take over the body. I let him have all the beauty sleep I could spare, but I didn't want the ordinary doctors screwing up the evidence any more than it already had been.”

Sullivan took a sip of coffee and cradled his chin in his massive hand. Some life suffused his reddened eyes as he grinned. “That old Scot is a bugger to wake up. I always have to hold the phone two feet from my ear when I call at night. But he came through for us. He got to the hospital in half an hour, reeking of whiskey but at full steam. He ranted up and down about the suturing, but after he'd examined the body and looked at the medical records, he came out with his theory. Sharp, smooth-edged knife, at least six-inch blade, he guessed about an inch to an inch and a half wide. He'll know more after the autopsy. One smooth horizontal stroke in and out.”

Green whistled. “Neat job.”

“Yup. And into the middle of all this, without any warning, just as MacPhail is loading the body bag into the elevator to go down to the morgue, along comes the little rookie again wanting us to unbag the body so mummy's assistant can have a look.”

“In the middle of the hospital hallway?”

Sullivan laughed. “That was my reaction. I was tired and I was mad about all the mistakes people had made, especially him. So I told him to follow proper procedure and take the
assistant down to meet us at the morgue.”

“Nothing wrong with that, Brian. Rigid, maybe, but by the book. No one can fault you for that.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, the Deputy Chief did. Showed up twenty minutes later with this Weiss guy in tow, ripping a strip off me for caring more about procedure than about the decent citizens of Ottawa. I saw my whole career flashing before my eyes. My mortgage, my three kids, tuition for college—all bye-bye.”

“Ach! Political grandstanding to impress the Chief, that's all. You've done the right things, Brian. You were the first person to act like a professional in this whole mess.”

“Yeah. We'll know soon, won't we? When I've been assigned to permanent traffic detail.”

Green grinned. “You've been assigned to me. So let's get on it. Did you have time to find witnesses or interview anyone?”

Sullivan rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Besides the young woman who found him? Are you kidding? I was so busy chasing the body and mopping up everyone else's mess, I had no time to investigate! We don't have one lead, we don't have shit, but every ‘t' has been crossed.”

Green felt the caffeine from his second cup beginning to spread through his system, bringing with it a return of optimism. He glanced at his watch. Nine oh-five. “Right now I'm heading over to interview the mother. That's going to be a tough one, so I'll be turning off my radio, but you can reach me by cell if you have to. Arrange a briefing for ten-thirty with all the men Jules gave me.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “We'll find a trail, Brian, once we start talking to Jonathan Blair's friends and family. A nice kid who studies Shakespeare and lives with Mummy can't have too many enemies.”

The Village of
Rockcliffe Park was not a village in any normal sense of the word, except perhaps in exclusivity. It was a tree-lined enclave perched on a bluff above the Ottawa river, surrounded by the bustling city and boasting the highest per capita income of any municipality in Canada. Mercedes and Volvos sat discreetly on shaded drives, and massive beds of peonies and irises framed the old stone mansions. Even the heat was tempered.

The living room of Marianne Blair's Rockcliffe mansion was painted Wedgwood blue, perfectly offsetting the rose floral love seats which framed the Persian rug. A discreet, oldmonied room, perfect for a rich benefactress, Green thought, except that the designer had neglected to take a good look at the owner. Marianne Blair contrasted harshly with her surroundings, at least in her current raw state. She hunched on the edge of a love seat, dressed in a shapeless brown sweat suit, her gray hair askew and large jowls quivering.

Her personal assistant stationed himself at her side, glaring at Green. Weiss had met the detective at the front door, wrinkling his nose visibly at Green's suit and inspecting his ID for a conspicuously long time. Green knew that at five feet, ten inches, with mousey brown hair and hazel eyes, he was remarkable only for his nose. It was the only visible trace of his Semitic heritage, which was generally honoured more in the
breach than in the observance.

His parents were both Holocaust survivors who had lost their first families to the ovens, and they had an almost paranoid fear of public exposure. They had met in a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after the war, but it had taken them nearly fifteen years to risk having a child, and even then the Jewish festivals had been muted, secretive affairs. Green had grown up with Hasidic folktales and Klezmer clarinets ringing in his ears, but outside the family walls, his parents cautioned their sandy-haired, hazel-eyed boy to keep his Jewishness to himself.

In the modern, urban world into which he moved, that proved seductively easy. He belonged to no synagogue or Jewish groups, worked in an entirely non-Jewish environment, had almost no Jewish friends and none of the previous women in his life, including his first wife, had been Jewish. His recent marriage to Sharon Levy had been as much of a surprise to him as it had been to his father. Although Sharon had been trying to introduce some Jewish traditions into their family life since the birth of their son, Green's identity still found its main outlet in his commitment to smoked meat, bagels and Nate's Delicatessen.

But for some, the nose was enough to fire up old myths and prejudices, and whether Weiss had reacted to the nose or the odour of his suit, Green couldn't be sure. Weiss had swivelled on his heel without a word and led the way across the vast marble foyer into the mercifully air-conditioned interior. He moved with impeccable grace, but his blue linen suit was buttoned wrong, and his toupee dipped over one ear. Not quite recovered from this morning's excursion after all, Green thought with some satisfaction.

On the drive over, he had tried to plan his interview
strategy. Marianne Blair, he had learned from Jules' briefing file, was the only child of a wealthy British Columbia shipping magnate who had made his fortune as a young man shipping timber from the virgin forests of the young province. He had diversified into oil and real estate later in life and had established the Lindmar Foundation as a means of purchasing immortality, as well as tax relief. To groom his daughter for her role as elegant patroness, he had sent her first to Eastern private schools and later to universities in British Columbia and Europe. But rumour had it that beneath the civilized veneer, Marianne Blair was her father's clone: willful, self-indulgent and stubborn as a mule.

Green had expected to find her raging mad and demanding vengeance. Judging from the way the law enforcement top brass had jumped to attention earlier, he had thought he would be bullied and threatened. But seated opposite her now, looking into her eyes, he saw no fire in them. Only bewilderment. She was a mother like any other at this moment, he thought, and felt himself relax. With her permission, he set his tape recorder on the table so that he could give her his full attention.

“Mrs. Blair, I'm sorry,” he said simply. “I need to know about your son. Are you up to answering a few questions?”

She nodded, and he began. She had last seen Jonathan at breakfast yesterday, she said. They lived alone with a housekeeper; Jonathan was an only child, his parents divorced. It had been just like any other morning. Jonathan was an early riser, and she had a busy schedule ahead of her so they had eaten about seven. They had spoken little, but that too was usual. They liked each other's company but did not feel compelled to talk. She had reports to read, and he was absorbed in a journal article. He had always been a voracious
reader and never sat at the table without a book in hand. He had commented that he would be at the university all day and wasn't sure when he would be home. This too was usual. He spent much of his time in his lab or the library.