Honour Among Men (42 page)

By the time Green arrived home, it was five o'clock in the
afternoon and Sharon's car was not in the driveway. He'd forgotten she was at work. He'd called her earlier in the day so that she wouldn't panic when the news broke about a fatal shooting in the Patricia Ross case. But with a dozen officers milling around, he'd kept his personal comments to a minimum.

Now, the sight of the empty driveway filled him with gloom. So much had happened in the past week that it felt like a lifetime since he'd really talked to her. God, he needed to talk.

Hannah was sprawled on the living room sofa, ostensibly babysitting Tony, but she was deep in conversation on her cellphone, and Tony was fast asleep on the floor. A MuchMusic video of gyrating guitar players blared on the television.

She looked up at his entrance without the slightest hint of guilt. “Are you making dinner?”

He dumped his keys on the hall bookcase, too weary even to pick up the mail. “No, I'm not. I have to go back to the station to interview a prisoner soon.”

“Oh.” A faint scowl marred her innocent pixie face, and she returned to her phone conversation. His anger flared, and he opened his mouth to voice it, but stopped himself. Fighting with Hannah took far more energy and emotion than he could muster at the moment.

Instead, he dragged himself upstairs, stripped his clothes, and stood under the pulsing shower, hoping to gather strength from its heat. He emerged more depressed than ever. He'd experienced this feeling often enough in the past to recognize what was happening. After a week of subsisting on adrenaline and sheer force of will, he'd hit the wall at the end of the race. Usually he had enough elation and triumph to carry him through the aftermath, but today he had neither.

He crawled into bed and pulled the duvet up to his chin. Desperately he willed his body to relax and his mind to go
blank. He had only two hours before all hell would break loose over Weiss's detention, and he needed to wring the truth out of the man before the lawyers and the union threw half a dozen gag orders in his way.

There was a knock on the door, and to his astonishment Hannah appeared, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and some dubious-looking lumps of dough. An uncertain smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Tony and I baked peanut butter cookies. Since you have to go out again, I thought you might like some tea.”

He sat up in bed, surprised to find he couldn't speak around the sudden lump in his throat. She laid the tray on the bed and stood over him, fiddling with his cup. “I guess you had quite a day, eh? I caught part of it on the news.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to deny it. To protect her—and himself—from the gruesome imagery of his job. But in the end he sank back among his pillows with a sigh. “Yes. I lost a friend today.”

“That homeless woman?”

He nodded. A facile platitude sprang to his thoughts, that maybe the homeless woman had finally found her home. She had clearly chosen her end, trading her life for Weiss's, as if it somehow paid for the life she herself had taken years ago. Yet anger drove the easy answer from his mind. She had not deserved the murder of her children, nor the bullet at the hands of Hamm. It had all been a senseless, goddamn waste of one of the good souls in this world.

Hannah poured his tea and held it out. He looked at her veiled eyes. “Will you join me?”

She shot him a glance and edged to the door. “No, I . . .” She examined her painted toes, scarlet now instead of black. Progress. “Well, I guess maybe a minute. Then I got a call to make.”

A minute may be all either of us can handle, he thought as
he shifted over to give her a place to sit. They could talk about rock music, and maybe that minute would give him the strength to go back into battle for the final round.

September 22, 1993. Medak, Sector South, Croatia
.

It's 2 a.m. and it feels too heavy to keep inside. I imagine it growing and swelling ‘til I think maybe the only way to relieve the pain is to plunge a knife in my gut and burst it
.

Captain Blakeley came to me today and told me the conversation we were about to have didn't happen. He told me the
OC
is recommending me for a Medal of Bravery for my civilian rescue. Then he said he knew about the Croat soldiers and by all rights I should be thrown in detention or slapped in the psych ward. I was a disgrace to the uniform, a traitor to Canada's peacekeeping ideals and a menace to those we're sworn to protect. We're not the judge, jury and executioner over here, he said. We don't have any idea what these people have been through and we have no right to play God with their lives
.

But the army really needs the morale boost of a successful mission and the example of my medal, he said, so he wasn't going to put anything on my record. It's our secret, he said, and unless you want to see the whole Second Princess Patricia Light Infantry Battalion hung out to dry in the press, you'll never reveal it to a living soul
.

Then he walks out. What the hell is this traitor and menace crap? What ever happened to the guy who promised only three days ago that we'd make the bastards pay?

To his surprise, when Green arrived back at the station, Weiss was ignoring the advice of his lawyers and his association rep and was clamouring to talk to him. Sullivan had gone home to treat himself to a well-earned Senators playoff hockey game, but Gibbs had returned to the station, eager to get at the man who had betrayed Sue. When he came down to the video room, where Green was supervising the set-up, he was vibrating with an energy Green couldn't quite interpret. Part rage, part triumph, part pure testosterone.

“I know you want this, Bob,” Green said, “but that's a good reason for you to stay out of it.”

“I won't interrupt, sir. I just want to be there, to watch you and—and to hear what the bastard has to say.”

“But Weiss knows how you feel. Having you there . . .” Staring him down, Green wanted to add, but thought better of it, “. . . is going to colour his statement. It may even shut him down.”

Gibbs took a deep breath, as if to galvanize himself. Anger glinted through his excitement, and for a moment Green thought he was actually going to lash back.

“You can watch from the video room,” he added, to forestall an outburst the usually diffident Gibbs would later regret. “Sue would appreciate that.”

The mention of Peters seemed to deflate Gibbs, and he looked at his feet awkwardly. “She doesn't remember wh-what
happened. I suppose that's a good thing.”

“Probably,” Green said. On balance he thought so. Amnesia seemed to be nature's way of shielding the mind from terrors too great to bear. Given the alternative—years of nightmares and flashbacks—he wished it was something he could invoke at will. “I heard she was talking today. I bet she'll be back on the job in no time.”

Gibbs shuffled his feet. “I hope it . . . it hasn't changed her. Taken away her nerve.”

“Sue Peters? Not on your life!” Green spoke with more confidence than he felt, but for now it was what they all wanted to believe. “Now let's get at that sonofabitch who put her there.”

Green had seen so many faces of Weiss over the past week that he wasn't sure who was going to walk through the interview door, but he prepared himself as best he could. He stationed Jones unobtrusively just inside the door and placed two molded chairs at right angles. A notebook and pen lay on the small, square table between them. Simple, intimate, yet professional.

Weiss was wearing nondescript cellblock scrubs that hung on him, several sizes too big, but he'd been allowed to shave and comb his hair. Green suspected he had not received the most compassionate treatment from the guards in the cell block—stabbing your partner in the back would not earn you points among your fellow officers—but at least they had allowed him to salvage some of his dignity.

Even so, he looked as if he had precious little dignity left when he shuffled into the room. His blue eyes, only last week so cocksure, were red and puffy, and his shoulders sagged as if the world weighed heavily on them. Green hoped it did. He felt a flash of anger at the man, and he waited in silence until it receded. Then, summoning up a dispassion he didn't feel, he gestured to a chair.

“Sit down, Jeff.”

Weiss sat and only then raised his head to look around. His eyes passed over Jones as if he were invisible, then came to rest on the camera lens in the corner. “Do we have to do that?”

“You know the drill, Jeff.” For the record, he explained the legalities of videotaping, repeated the Charter warning, and made the formal introductions for the tape.

Weiss gripped his head in his hands and shook it slowly back and forth. “I just need you to believe me.” He flicked his hand at the camera. “They won't. The fucking brass won't.”

“This is not a private confessional, Weiss. Just so you know, the
OPP
has connected you to the call that tipped Hamm off about Peters. The Petawawa convenience store owner
ID
'ed you. And the Tim Hortons manager here on Bank Street picked you out as the one asking about Twiggy last Thursday. It's looking pretty bad. Obstruction of justice, kidnapping . . .”

Weiss jerked his head up as if stung. “I didn't kidnap Twiggy! I took her to keep her safe!”

Great job you did, Green thought drily. He softened his voice with an effort. “Okay, maybe it would help if you start at the beginning.”

“With Patricia Ross?”

“With Ian MacDonald.”

He glanced at Green in bewilderment. “I don't see what MacDonald has to do with it.”

“Weiss, stop dicking around. I know about MacDonald's actions in Croatia. I want to know your part in it.”

For a moment, Green feared his loss of patience would jeopardize the interview, to say nothing of the case if Weiss's lawyer got hold of it. But it seemed to focus the man. He stared at the table and ran his tongue around his parched lips. “Croatia. Fuck. I was way over my head in Croatia, but the
UN
needed police who could speak the language, and my mother was from Sarajevo. I grew up in the Croatian community in North York, and I figured it was a chance to see my roots.” He shut his eyes and winced as if at the memory. “They should never have put Macdonald on clean-up duty in Medak. The fucking Croats . . . They wiped out everything. Over three hundred homes destroyed, almost two hundred animals slaughtered, not to mention the mutilated people. So when I came across the dead Croat soldiers, I didn't know what to make of it. I mean—this wasn't just some combatants shot in a skirmish. The guys' heads were obliterated. Then a couple of local Serb villagers who'd been hiding in the hills told me it was a blue helmet. I was afraid one of our guys was maybe going off the deep end, so I reported it to my unit commander.”

“Blakeley.”

Weiss nodded. “The best commander I've ever had. A take-charge, buck-stops-here kind of guy who stood up for his men. Blakeley told me the Serbs were probably lying to protect one of their own, and who could blame them anyway? He told me to leave it with him.”

“So you never knew how he handled the situation?”

“No, but whatever he did, he backed MacDonald up. Not like the kind of chicken shit superior who leaves you hanging out to dry when things get rough for you.”

Green pondered the story. It corroborated what Blakeley had said, but if it was true, why had Daniel Oliver accused Blakeley of betrayal? Something didn't make sense. “Did you know MacDonald killed himself two years later?”

“Dick Hamm told me.”

“Did you know Hamm back then?”

“Just by reputation.”

“Which was?”

“A hardass, but another guy you want in your corner when the bullets start flying.” Weiss's jaw tightened, and tears brimmed in his eyes. “Shows you how fucking wrong I was.”

Green sensed they were finally hovering on the brink of the real story. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “So tell me how you got into this mess, Jeff.”