Stranglehold (3 page)

“Give me one day. We’ll do everything we can to find him. I’m confident there will be some explanation for this.”

Norville squinted at the big clock on the sidewall above the jury box. She sighed. “For the record. It is now 10:09
A.M.
on September tenth. This court is adjourned until one o’clock. Mr. Cutter, if your client isn’t standing right beside you this afternoon, I’m going to issue a bench warrant. And he’ll sit in jail until this trial is over. Got it?”

“Yes, Your Honour.”

Amankwah had never seen Cutter look so humble in court.

“And, Mr. Cutter,” she said.

“Yes, Your Honour.”

“If I were you, I’d pray very hard that he hasn’t left the country.”

Out in the hallway, Cutter marched away, tearing off the white tabs around his neck and unbuttoning the top button of his too-tight white court shirt. The slap of his black wingtip shoes echoed off the marble walls with a loud clang sound. Amankwah caught up and walked with him step for step.

“Where do you think Wainwright’s gone?” he asked.

Cutter shrugged. “How the fuck should I know? This job would be a hell of a lot easier if we didn’t have clients.”

“What are you going to do to find him?”

“Call in Dudley Do-Right and the Mounties,” Cutter said. He got to the frosted-glass door of the barristers’ lounge. A prominent sign above the wood handle read:
LOUNGE STRICTLY RESERVED FOR MEMBERS OF THE LAW SOCIETY OF UPPER CANADA. CLIENTS AND MEDIA ARE STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

He yanked the door open and disappeared.

Amankwah stood alone in the empty hallway. He looked down at the pathetic few lines he’d scribbled down in his reporter’s notebook. Shit. A dud story on a dud Monday morning.

GREENE STEPPED INSIDE THE MOTEL BATHROOM. IT WAS EMPTY. IN THE SINK, A HALF BOTTLE
of champagne lay in pool of icy water.

He wanted to vomit. Under his helmet, tears were streaming down his eyes. He could hardly see. He could hardly think.

How could Jennifer be dead? Murdered?

Ari, think, he yelled at himself. This is a crime scene. Everything here is evidence.

He looked back at the bed, tiptoed out, and crouched down beside Jennifer. He wanted this one last, private chance to see her, before it all began.

She was curled up under the covers. The candle burning by her side. His heart was thumping harder than he’d ever felt it.

He froze.

He didn’t want to leave. Didn’t want the moment to end. Time had lost all meaning. At last he got up. Careful not to disturb anything, he took a step back and reached again for his cell phone.

He heard a sound. Something scratching against the outside of the front door, which he hadn’t closed behind him.

Someone was out there.

He jammed the phone back in his pocket. It was two steps to the foot of the bed and three more across to the door. He flung it open. Scanned the little courtyard. Something caught his eye at the passageway. A person fleeing. All he saw was the heel of a shoe before it disappeared around the corner.

He ran to the street, puffing hard under the helmet, the visor crashing down with his motion. There was no one in front of the motel. Out on Kingston Road, three lanes of traffic whizzed by in both directions. To his left was an empty lot. To his right was the strip mall where he’d parked his scooter. No one was there either.

He sprinted over to the mall. A few cars were parked, but nothing seemed out of place. He looked up a short alley that started between two stores and saw a garbage can that seemed to have just been overturned. He ran through the
alley. At its end, just steps away, two residential streets intersected, going off in four directions. He forced himself to stand still to see if anything moved. Look, he told himself. Look. Listen.

Nothing.

Whoever it was could have gone down any of these roads.

He needed to catch his breath. Back at his scooter he looked at the motel entrance. No one was in front. Across Kingston Road was a big shopping mall. No windows faced outward. Cars kept zipping by as if nothing unusual had happened. He reached for his cell phone again.

As he was about to dial in, he heard a siren come screaming toward him. He looked down Kingston Road and saw a police cruiser flying up the street, full flashers on. Right behind it was an ambulance, lights and sirens roaring too.

He watched in amazement as they tore through the traffic, zipped past him, and cut into the motel courtyard.

He looked at the cell phone in his hand. There was no point in calling 911 now. If he did, it would just add to the confusion.

But wait.

Something about this didn’t make sense.

His phone told him it was 10:44.

Response time on an emergency call like this would take about seven or eight minutes, max. He knew for sure he’d walked into the room at 10:41. Someone had called in the murder before he got there. But what if he’d been on time? What if he hadn’t given chase to this suspect?

He thought of Raglan, strangled. The most intimate and angry way to kill someone. Then of her body, neatly tucked into bed. The one candle still lit. As if the killer had felt remorseful.

Jennifer’s phone call. Her husband, Howard, had texted her and wanted to have coffee with her this morning. She’d said no. Said she was going running.

His shoulders slumped. Somehow, Howard must have found out about their affair. He could see it. The poor man, enraged to the point that he killed his wife. Then he called 911 and waited until Greene showed up. He wanted to set him up for his crime. Made sense. Obviously he was the person at the door who’d run away.

Greene had seen this too many times in his career, a murdering spouse turned suicidal. If he was on foot, Howard was probably on one of those streets behind the strip mall. Intent on ending it all.

Greene pocketed his phone and jumped on his scooter.

WALK SLOWLY, HOMICIDE DETECTIVE DANIEL KENNICOTT TOLD HIMSELF AS GOT OUT OF THE
unmarked police car. He’d parked at the far corner of the cracked concrete driveway in front of the Maple Leaf Motel so he could get a view of the whole scene.

Walking or doing anything slowly didn’t come naturally to Kennicott. But after five impatient years on the police force, at the end of June he’d finally made it to the homicide squad. It felt like forever, even though he’d done it in record time, thanks mostly to his mentor, Ari Greene, who was the master of the slow, deliberate homicide walk.

Greene wasn’t here. Which was how it should be. Kennicott was on his own now, about to take on his first murder case.

At the entrance to the motel’s courtyard, a well-dressed man in street clothes was talking on his cell phone. He nodded as Kennicott approached. Although they’d never met, Kennicott knew this would be Detective Raymond Alpine from 43 Division.

While Kennicott was rushing over here, he’d been on the phone with Alpine, who updated him on what they had so far: At 10:39, police received a 911 call about an apparent homicide in room 8 at the Maple Leaf Motel. The first squad car and the ambulance arrived at 10:44. At 10:48, PC Arthurs, the first officer on scene, reported that she had gone into the room, accompanied by an ambulance attendant, and found a white female, estimated age thirty-five to forty-five, NVA – no vital signs apparent, the victim of an apparent strangulation. Alpine arrived at 10:51, went inside the room briefly with the same attendant, and confirmed the initial findings. By 10:58, he had deployed two pairs of officers to knock on every door in the motel. It had twenty-six rooms. The identification officer who would be in charge of all forensic work was en route and would be there shortly.

Kennicott introduced himself, giving the detective a firm handshake.

“Raymond Alpine.” The officer’s voice was laconic, verging on bored.

Kennicott pointed into the courtyard at the squad car and ambulance parked there. “You guys got here fast,” he said.

Alpine shrugged. “Slow Monday. We were hoping Gwyneth Paltrow would stop in at the station. We even got a whole box of fresh doughnuts for her. But she never showed.”

Kennicott realized that for Alpine this was just another hooker-motel murder. He couldn’t blame the guy for being jaded. These homicides were almost always the same: a prostitute, too old for the game, with a drug or alcohol problem, or both, was found stabbed to death, or with her head bashed in, or, as in this case, strangled. The murders were nearly always a crime of passion. The perpetrator could be counted on to be some loner, often with no criminal record, who was bad at covering his tracks. He’d claim he’d lost his head, usually after the woman had made some unflattering comment about his performance. Ninety-nine percent of these cases were settled with a quick plea to manslaughter.

Kennicott turned back to Kingston Road. Along this stretch, it was six lanes wide, with a concrete barrier in the middle. The blocks were long and the cars sped past. On the other side of the street, probably half a mile away, was an inward-facing shopping mall.

“Not much street life here for us to find witnesses,” he said.

Alpine snorted. “Welcome to outer Scarberia. I don’t know why they even bother building sidewalks.”

Scarberia was the nickname for Scarborough, Toronto’s sprawling eastern suburb. Home to bad planning, dysfunctional public transportation, horrendous high-rise housing, a mishmash immigrant population, and the city’s highest murder rate. Big surprise.

Kennicott pointed to the motel office. There didn’t appear to be anyone inside. “Anyone at the check-in desk see anything?”

“No such luck,” Alpine said. “Handwritten sign on the door says the owner is not in mornings from nine to eleven. There’s a cell number and we’ve called him. He’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

Kennicott frowned. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take a look around the courtyard while I’m waiting for the ident officer.”

He ducked under the yellow tape strung across the passageway and went through. He could see there was no other way in or out of the courtyard. It was a few steps to room 8, where a squad car and an ambulance were parked. A female
officer stood in front of the door, her arms crossed. She was a tall woman, close to six feet, just a few inches shorter than Kennicott.

He showed her his badge.

“Morning, Detective.” She unfolded her arms and shook his hand. “PC Arthurs.”

“You were the first officer on scene,” he said.

“Yes.” She was holding a police notebook in her other hand so tightly her knuckles were white. Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched for such a big woman and Kennicott wondered if it was always this way or if it was stress.

“Your first homicide?” he asked.

“How’d you guess?”

“You went in with the ambulance attendant.”

Arthurs nodded.

“He try CPR?”

“No. Said there was no pulse, no breath.”

“So the scene’s undisturbed.”

She nodded again. “We were real careful not to touch anything.”

He peeked past her into the motel room. It was dark except for a candle flickering on the far bedside table. The bathroom door was open.

“Detective Kennicott,” a loud voice with a heavy East European accent called out from behind him. “Is detective now, no?”

Brygida Zeilinski, a squat Polish woman and veteran identification officer, waddled toward him at a determined pace, a black fanny-pack bouncing on her stomach. She looked like a pregnant penguin on the march, Kennicott thought as he reached out to shake her hand.

“Is Scarborough prostitute killing, no?” she said, her face a big frown. Ari Greene liked to brag that he was the only one on the force who could make Zeilinski smile. “Easy case for your first homicide, yes?”

“Let’s take a look,” he said.

She pulled two pairs of latex gloves and plastic shoe coverings out of her fanny pack and handed him one. Kennicott put them on then pressed the door to room 8 with his forefinger. It creaked on rusty hinges.

A queen-size bed dominated the room. He could see the back of the woman’s head on a pillow, facing away from the door, her body covered neatly by a comforter. That was unusual. Most killers would have left the poor woman in a crumpled, discarded state. Kennicott pictured some future defence lawyer arguing
in court that this showed his client was filled with remorse – after, that is, the man had strangled his victim to death with his bare hands.

Steps behind him, he could hear Zeilinski breathing calmly. For her, this was just another day at the office.

There was little space to get around the bed. A dresser sat to his left. On top were four thick white candles, none of them burning, though he could see recently melted wax on each. Beside them was an iPod Nano in a small speaker dock but no music was playing.

He locked eyes with Zeilinski. He knew they were both thinking the same thing: This woman must have fancied herself a high-class hooker. He tiptoed around the bed to where the woman’s head was facing the bathroom door. There were traces of a tread mark under the handle of the hollow-core door where it had been dented.

Someone had kicked it in. The violence to the door was in stark contrast to this otherwise serene murder scene, he thought.

The bathroom was empty, save for a half bottle of champagne in the sink, sitting in water with a few small chips of ice still intact. An empty ice bucket was underneath.

“I check the temperature in the bathroom and the temperature of that water,” Zeilinski said.

“Sure,” he said.

In the main room, he spotted a red wig and a pair of oversize sunglasses on the floor beside the bed. This was even stranger. Why would a hooker go to this trouble to hide her identity?

The candle on the bedside table had burned down farther than the extinguished ones on the dresser.

“I photograph and videotape all the candles right away,” she said. “Then blow this one out.”

“Okay,” he said.

“The iPod too. Make them all exhibits.”

“Fine,” he said. Good identification officers tended to be fanatical about even the most irrelevant details. Often it made for a ton of extra work, but he knew it was the price of admission.