Honour Among Men (18 page)

At three o'clock in the afternoon, it was too late for the lunch crowd and too early for anyone but the serious drinkers, but nonetheless she found a bunch of rookie privates shooting pool in the corner. Their freshly shaved heads and lean, trim bodies despite the quantity of beer cans stacked on a nearby table gave them away. They hooted when she walked in, but she ignored them. Not one of them looked over twenty, and she was looking for an older crowd. The type of men Patricia would have sought out were the type who'd been around and had the war stories to prove it. Cops or soldiers, they were all the same. Old drunks only needed a listening ear and the occasional top-up to recount the horrors they had survived. Proud of the wounds and the toughness they stood for. When in fact they hadn't survived at all.

She found her man at the back of the bar, nursing a beer and scotch chaser as he watched the pool game. She walked the length of the bar and chose a stool several down from his, ignoring him. The bartender, a skinny mass of sinew and bone, was leaning against the wall, watching her. He made no move to approach.

“Give me a Blue,” she said.

He shoved himself off the wall, reached beneath the bar and pulled out a can. Without cracking the tab, he plunked it down on the counter.

“I'm looking for a woman,” she said to the bartender. “Friend of mine who went missing a couple of weeks ago. She said she was coming up here to see an old friend. Mid-thirties, blonde going grey, on the thin side. She looks a bit rough right now. Has this big, ugly-ass black purse with pink daisies on it. She likes her liquor, so I'm hoping she's been in here.”

The bartender's expression didn't change, but he lifted his scrawny shoulders in a shrug.

“Thing is,” Peters said. “I'm worried about her. We've been through a lot of shit together, and she's not handling it as well as me. She might get in with a nasty crowd.”

“What do the cops want with Patti Oliver?” The voice came from the corner. Gravelly from cigarettes and booze.

Peters swung around to stare at the man against the wall. For a moment she was dumbstruck. “Patti Oliver. Yeah, that's her name. Did you see her?”

“Depends.”

She picked up her Blue and shifted to the stool next to him. Losing interest, the bartender wandered off towards the front.

“But you saw her. Is she all right?”

“You think I'm an idiot, lady? You come in here at three in the afternoon, as cool as you please, nice outfit, no fear. You got cop branded on your forehead. So I repeat, what do the cops want with Patti Oliver?”

Peters scrutinized him in the semi-darkness. At closer quarters, he was not as old or as far gone as she'd first thought. Amidst his wrinkled, leathery skin, his eyes were clear, and at the moment they appeared to see right through her. With a sigh, she reached into her purse and took out the photos.

“Is this the woman you call Patti Oliver?”

The man spread the pictures on the bar and bent over them in the dim light. After a long look, he shoved them away. “She's dead.”

“Murdered.”

“Shit.”

Peters opened her notebook. “What did you talk to her about?”

“This and that. Her boyfriend that died. How she had a ticket to even the score, right here in this town.”

“Even the score. Those were her words? What did she mean?”

“Beats me. She was playing things pretty close to her chest. But she was asking questions about the base, and did I know the guys who served in Croatia. And also the election. Kind of weird, that, wanting to know the background of the guys who were running. I don't follow that shit, but some of the men are pretty excited about it this time. So—”

“Hey, officer!” It was the bartender calling. She looked up to see him standing at the phone near the door. “Your partner called. He wants you to meet him outside
ASAP
, around the back where you parked the car.”

Peters cursed. Moron, she thought, blowing my cover like that. And what the hell is this
ASAP
shit? Couldn't he wait till I'm done my first stop?

She shoved the photos back into her purse and turned to the guy at the bar. “Hold that thought. I'll be right back once I deal with this. And the next beer's on me.”

She stomped out of the dark bar and paused, blinded for a moment by the bright afternoon sun. After getting her bearings, she headed for the car.

Muttering, “Okay, asshole, this had better be good.”

June 23, Sector West, Croatia
.

Dear Kit . . . Only eight days till my
UN
leave and I can't wait to see you, hang out at the farm, watch
TV
, go to a movie. Man, just to take a walk down the lane without checking for mines! It's been boring here, sitting at the hot dog stand all day. The rules have changed, which is frustrating. We're not supposed to confiscate weapons any more, we're supposed to ask the belligerents nicely if they'd like to give them up. Like that's going to happen!

So the other day a bunch of Serbs walked in and took all their rifles and grenades out of the cache we had them in, and we couldn't do a fucking thing. I thought the Hammer was going to have a stroke. He's on the radio screaming to the
OC
, but that's the orders from the new Sector West commander. Jordanian guy. I don't know about this multi-national idea, seems like the Canadians are the only ones who know what we're doing. So of course the Croats start screaming favouritism and they haul out their guns too. And all our hard work getting the place calmed down so you could walk around without shells flying over your heads, that's all going to be down the tubes
.

On the bright side, our section beat 3 Section at soccer yesterday. Afterwards at the mess, Sarge did a little dance on the table again. From a strict religious Prairie boy, he's getting to be the life of the party. And another good thing, Fundy has
made a real difference to the mines. She finds them better than the engineers, and she gets such a kick out of it. Big smile on her face and her tongue hanging out as she waits for her treat. Yesterday she was tagging along with Mahir and she spotted one buried right on the path he uses every day to get home
.

Sue Peters was being airlifted to the Ottawa Hospital on advanced life support. By the time the helicopter was scheduled to touch down at seven-fifteen, Green had already been on the phone with the military police, the Petawawa
OPP
and the Pembroke Hospital. He'd spoken to everyone from the first officer on the scene to the doctors who had tried to patch her together. He'd briefed Barbara Devine and prepared a short statement for the press.

He knew everything that had happened from the moment Peters' battered body had been discovered inside an abandoned railway warehouse, but not a damn thing about how she got there. Constable Weiss had been nearly incoherent when questioned by the local police, and doctors had stuffed him full of tranquillizers before packing him into the back of an
OPP
cruiser and shipping him off to Ottawa.

By seven o'clock, Elgin Street Headquarters was teeming with people. Off-duty officers, on hearing the news, had reported in to learn the latest details, to volunteer for extra duty, or simply to be among their own. Coordination between the various police services involved had now gone up the chain of command to Barbara Devine, but when she phoned down to demand that Green come upstairs to a meeting with herself and the local brass from the military and provincial police services, he refused.

“I've got a critically injured officer landing at the Civic Campus in less than fifteen minutes. That's where I'm needed, Barbara. You guys decide how this is going to be run.” He paused as he caught sight of Bob Gibbs pacing back and forth across the squad room, talking to a rapt group of detectives. It looked as if the whole Major Crimes Unit, and quite a few of the other units, had come to commiserate. Nothing was worse than an officer down. These guys needed to be involved. “Just make sure you put me on any joint task force you create.”

To her credit, Devine did not protest. It seemed even she understood this was one time when bureaucracy took a back seat. Green hung up, grabbed his jacket and headed out into the squad room to round up Gibbs. Throughout the entire car ride from Elgin Street to the Civic Hospital, the young detective talked non-stop, reviewing over and over the details of the investigation to date. His speculations made no sense, but Green let him talk. Exhaustion and self-recrimination would take over soon enough.

The helicopter was just flying into view when they drove up to the landing site, which sat at the edge of a field across Carling Avenue from the hospital. In the darkness, lights and vehicles appeared to be everywhere. A circle of lights marked the landing pad, and a ground ambulance sat by the tarmac, lights flashing and stretcher ready. Green had the ridiculous thought that it would probably be faster to wheel the stretcher across Carling Avenue to the hospital on foot.

At the entrance to the landing field, a burly ground crew worker flagged him to a stop, ignored Green's badge and waved them over to the parking lot of the hospital emergency department across the street. “You'll have to check in at Admissions, sir,” he shouted over the deafening roar of the helicopter. Dust and wind swirled in the air. “They'll want some information.”

Green parked in a restricted area closest to the door, slapped a police sticker on the dash and led Gibbs inside to the Admissions Desk in Emergency, which was right next to the ambulance bay. Heavy metal swing doors separated the admissions area from the unloading area, however, so they only caught a fleeting glimpse of Peters' still form as the stretcher whisked by. White coats swirled around her, and a man's voice snapped out her vital signs. The flurry of activity was over as quickly as it blew up, leaving no one left to ask.

Green introduced himself to the admissions clerk and told her he'd like to speak to the doctor in charge as soon as he or she was available. The clerk gave him a brief, distracted nod before returning to her forms. The emergency room was filled with people slumped in chairs along the walls, talking in hushed whispers, reading, or simply staring into space. Several watched Green and Gibbs with idle curiosity.

They never did see an
ER
physician, but about fifteen minutes later, the air ambulance crew emerged from behind the steel doors and stopped by to give them a report on their way back out to the helicopter. They looked grim.

“She's going straight up to surgery, sir,” said the senior paramedic. “The
OR
was all set up and waiting for her. But I don't want to sugarcoat it. We got her here in very good time, and she had a carotid pulse when the surgical team took her up to the
OR
, and those are both positives. But she's lost a lot of blood, and she sustained fairly extensive injuries to the head. Some bastard beat her up pretty bad.”

Green listened with grim calm. He had already heard about the beating from the Petawawa
OPP
, but Gibbs's reaction stopped him from asking further details. The young man suddenly swayed on his feet, and Green and the paramedic dived to catch his arms before he slumped to the ground. With
practised calm, the paramedic helped him to a chair, forced his head between his knees and ordered Green to get some water.

When Green returned with the water, Gibbs was hunched forward, clutching his head in his hands and rocking from side to side. “I should never have sent her alone. What was I thinking? I should never have sent her alone.”

Oh, shit, Green thought, the self-recrimination has started already. “And maybe I should never have gone to Halifax,” he interrupted. “But Bob—”

“You should never have put me in charge.”

Probably not, once I saw how ruthless the killer was, Green thought, but he forced his own self-doubts out of mind. He dragged out the only platitudes he could think of. Platitudes that had been fed to him six years earlier, and rang as true and as hollow now as they had then. “Bob, these things happen. We're out there in danger every day. We make judgment calls on a wing and a prayer, and sometimes we're wrong.”

“But I knew she was inexperienced. I-I just didn't have the balls to tell her no. She wanted it so bad.”

“You followed proper procedure; you sent someone with her.”

“Another mistake. Where the f-fuck was Weiss when this happened to her?”

Where the fuck indeed, Green thought grimly. The man didn't need to be a major crimes detective to know the basic premise of policing. Officer safety first. Never leave your partner's back exposed. Constable Weiss had a hell of a lot to answer for when he finally made it back to Ottawa, no matter what his mental state.

For now it was a waiting game. The hospital directed them to a more private room up on the surgical floor, and officers drifted in and out in search of news and moral support. As the
evening dragged on, one of Gibbs's friends took him down to the cafeteria for some food and Green used the opportunity to duck outside and update Sharon.