Stray Bullets (24 page)

People came to Toronto from every corner of the world, it seemed, to shoplift at the Bay, pass rubber checks at Home Hardware, or snatch the money from the tip jar at Second Cup.

It took almost three hours to work through the box. He had found only four possible Romanian names, but two were men in their fifties, and one warrant had actually been enforced and the man was in jail. He put the last one on the concrete floor, packed up the box, and took out the one from five years ago.

Half a decade.

It amazed him to think of his life back then. He was working blocks from here, on the forty-fourth floor of a huge office tower with a stunning view of the lake. A rising star in Miller, Ford, one of the largest law firms in the country. He had been personally recruited by Lloyd Granwell, a lawyer who was unparalleled in the range of his knowledge and influence. He was dating Andrea and her modeling career had just taken off. His father was a semiretired judge working on a major inquiry; his mother was still one of the top investigative journalists in the country. And his older brother, Michael, had recently moved out to Calgary, where he headed up a major consulting firm.

How quickly it had all crumbled. That summer his parents were killed by a drunk driver, an impecunious ne’er-do-well named Arthur Rake, on their weekly drive to their cottage. Twelve months later, Michael was murdered the night he’d flown into Toronto to meet Daniel on his way to some still-unexplained trip to Gubbio, a small town in Italy. A year later Andrea took off for Paris.

He spent about two hours going through the next box of warrants and finished in an hour and a half. As with any repetitive task, there were shortcuts to be found. He did the last three in four hours. He’d brought some food with him and hadn’t left the room all day. This kind of focused concentration had made him such a good lawyer. All his work had netted him four warrants with names and ages that were promising.

Cosmin Fidatov was a twenty-six-year-old student who’d been arrested for public mischief after he’d vomited on the sidewalk outside the Brunswick House, a pub that was popular with undergraduates at the University of Toronto. To top off his evening, he’d also smashed his beer bottle against the front door. Dorin Goga was twenty-four and had stolen an iPod from the Mac Store in Eaton Centre. He gave
his occupation as computer analyst. Dragomir Ozera, age twenty-five, was caught stealing cheese, pâté, and crackers from Pusateri’s, an expensive food chain in the city. Vasilica Neacsu, a twenty-eight-year-old auto mechanic, had passed a bad check at Creeds dry cleaning, a high-end service.

Kennicott stared at the four names and their meager profiles. He kept trying to picture the elusive “Jose Doe.” Fidatov, the drunken beer-bottle smasher, didn’t fit the bill. He crossed the name out. Goga, the student who’d stolen the iPod, and Neacsu, the guy who took his clothes to get dry-cleaned, were close. He put the numbers two and three beside their names. Something about the cheekiness of someone who would steal pâté from Pusateri’s sounded like the same guy who’d hang out with the pretty server in back of the Tim Hortons.

He circled the name and opened up the warrant to find the officer who’d made the arrest. PC Arnold Lindsmore, metro Toronto police, badge number 1997, from 52 Division.

Let’s hope the cop remembered this guy named Ozera.

For the third straight night in a row this week Nancy Parish was still at her desk, and her law office seemed more like a cage or a prison than a place where she worked. Especially since she spent way more hours here than at her little semidetached house. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had anything close to a normal evening at home.

It was freezing outside, and after a day of running from overheated buildings to her cold car, again and again, layer after layer of frozen sweat had accumulated all across her body. What a lovely thought.

The garbage can below her desk was filled with empty take-out sushi packaging and three cans of Diet Coke. She’d been putting each witness statement in a separate folder and hand-labeling them. Yellow files were for the civilian witnesses. Red for the cops. Blue for the forensics, people who’d analyzed fingerprints, DNA, blood samples. White files she reserved for the most difficult witnesses: Suzanne Howett, the server at Tim Hortons, who although she hadn’t said a lot had enough evidence to hurt their case badly; Jet, who’d told the cops to get lost and hadn’t said a thing; and most important of all, Dewey Booth, his skimpy one-page statement and signed agreement between Ralph Armitage and Booth’s lawyer, Phil Cutter. Plus his extensive criminal record.

The window of her Bay Street office looked north across Queen Street, and she could see the big square in front of the new city hall and her favorite winter place in Toronto—the open-air skating rink. On the other side of Bay Street, the old city hall clock tower began to ring out the hour, ten loud dongs for ten o’clock. She watched the city work crews turn off the overhead lights on the three concrete arches that lit the large white surface. A myriad collection of skaters—couples on first dates, gaggles of giggling girls and muscle-bound macho guys, and a few gray-haired figure skaters gliding with the veteran grace only gained by a lifetime of practice—headed off the ice.

Soon the hockey players would arrive, sticks slung over their shoulders like Robin’s soldiers in Sherwood Forest. Their skates, tied
together by their laces and wrapped around the end of the sticks, danced behind them in the clear night air. But instead of slipping through a wooded glen, the Gretzky wannabes would make their way to the open square by winding through myriad surrounding downtown office towers.

She stood and stretched. Peeled off her wool suit, silk shirt, and the damn pantyhose. They were ripped anyhow. In her corner closet she’d stacked long underwear, sweatpants, a thick sweatshirt, plus nylon pants and a shell to wear over it all as an extra layer. And her skates, her stick, her hockey gloves, her helmet, and a bag with a few pucks in it.

By the time the old city hall clock struck ten fifteen, she was sitting on a bench near the rink, tightening her waxed skate laces, her fingers freezing in the cold. Beside Parish, her friend the
Toronto Star
reporter Awotwe Amankwah was doing the same thing. They’d arranged to meet here tonight—this was their secret meeting place and a perfect one at that—and play.

“I need to find out what Dewey Booth is up to.” Parish grunted in the cold as she tugged on her laces.

“Cutter is smart. From what I’ve been able to find out, he sent the kid home to live with his father on that island.”

“Pelee Island.”

“That’s it. We went there once when I was a kid. All I remember is there were lots of birds and the place is real flat. We stopped in Chatham on the way down and went to a little museum about the underground railroad. I was amazed that there were black people living in Ontario so long ago.”

“They sure never taught us that in school,” Parish said. “Booth’s going to have to be back in Toronto to go to court.”

“Way I hear it, he’s coming in the night before. Cops are putting him up in a hotel, he testifies, then he’s gone. Cutter doesn’t want him here a minute longer than he needs to be until this whole thing is over. The press is on this story like you’ve never seen before in this city.”

She tied up her last lace and jammed her hands into her hockey gloves.

“Is Booth talking to the Crown?”

“No. Cutter’s got him clamped shut. Armitage is going to throw him up in the box at the prelim and get his evidence solid under oath.”

Parish had been thinking about the “prelim,” the preliminary inquiry, a lower-court hearing that tested whether there was enough
evidence for an accused to stand trial. Often the defense would “knock down” a first-degree charge to second-degree. That cut the minimum jail sentence from twenty-five to ten. Technically, the prelim was optional for an accused, but anyone charged with first-degree always had one.

“I figured Cutter would do that,” Parish said.

Amankwah looked up at her. “Once Booth fingers your boy at the prelim, you’re going to be in trouble.”

She jogged in place on her blades to stay warm. “I know. I might waive it.”

“The prelim? You crazy?” He tied up his last lace and shot to his feet.

“It’s a radical move. But the Crown can’t force the defense to have one. We can go straight to trial.”

“But at the prelim you’ve got a good chance of getting this knocked down to second-degree. Could save your kid fifteen years behind bars.”

“Right now all the prosecution has is Dewey Booth’s sworn affidavit. There are all sorts of holes in his story.”

“Such as?”

She smacked her stick on the rubber mats, for no real reason she could think of. But it was something hockey players did. She shook her head. “That, my friend, is something you’ll have to wait to see in court.”

He nodded. They understood that their friendship had professional limits. She would never disclose to him something that was covered by solicitor-client privilege. He would never reveal a source. “Still. Don’t you want to see the evidence at the prelim? Hear from all those civilian witnesses?”

“And give the Crown a chance to clean up all their inconsistencies?”

“You have a point.”

“And as you just said, Cutter’s keeping his client under wraps. And once he’s given evidence at the prelim, I’m up the creek.”

“All true. But are you prepared to risk fifteen years of your young client’s life? Still sounds crazy to me.”

She exhaled a cloud of white steam and pointed her stick at a bank tower across the square where a big digital clock illuminated the temperature. “It’s minus twenty degrees,” she said. “You were born in Africa, and now you’re outside playing hockey. So who’s crazy?”

Ari Greene had taken a number of precautions to protect PC Darvesh while the young police officer spent time as the cell mate of Larkin St. Clair. Only three people at the Toronto East Detention Centre knew he was a cop, none of them guards. Greene had been concerned that if the regular guards knew, they might subconsciously treat him differently, just the kind of thing a smart prisoner such as St. Clair might pick up on. And Jennifer Raglan was the only person in the Crown’s office who knew the case against him was a bogus file.

He’d only met with Darvesh once since the young officer had been incarcerated. That had been during regular prison visiting hours. Every week, Darvesh placed a collect call, as all the inmates did, from one of the two phones in the prisoners’ range. His calls went directly to the homicide bureau, where they were answered by a receptionist. He pretended to speak to his family and always worked in a complaint about how bland the food was. It was a simple code that meant nothing new had happened.

This morning, Darvesh was going to be in old city hall court for a remand of his case. Greene was on his way there to meet him, in a side cell out of view. This was tricky and had to be done fast to make sure none of the other prisoners became suspicious.

It was ridiculously cold, and just before he got inside the courthouse, Greene’s cell rang. “Your best friend just phoned from the cells in the bowels of the hall,” the receptionist at Homicide said.

“What did he say?” Greene asked. The wind was howling and he could hardly hear. His ears were freezing.

“Pretended he was talking to his brother and told me he’d managed to find some spice for his food.”

“Thanks,” Greene said. It meant Darvesh had some news.

He was glad to get inside, and ten minutes later, in a small room out of sight from the hundreds of prisoners brought into the big “bullpen” jail cell, he was talking to the prisoner known as Alisander Singh. His ears stung as they defrosted from the cold.

“We only have a few minutes,” Darvesh said. His arms looked muscular, the whole top of his torso more filled out.

“What have you got?” Greene asked. He’d bought a coffee at the concession stand in the basement, run by two old men who seemed to have been there for centuries, and passed it over to Darvesh.

He took a deep sip. “Thanks for this. Prison coffee is mostly water. St. Clair has been teaching me how to pump weights. We get gym twice a week.”

“Good.”

“Yesterday while we were doing curls he started talking.”

“What’d he say?”

“That prison was no big deal, but it was shit being inside if you were totally innocent.”

“Totally innocent?”

“That’s what he said.”

He offered Greene a sip. Greene laughed. “I can get as much fresh coffee as I want.”

“Habit,” Darvesh said. “When you come from a big family, you share everything.”

“Do you think he knows you’re a cop? Maybe he’s playing you.”

“Don’t know. He’s dumb like a fox. He might be trying to send you a message through me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he said there was another witness.”

Greene felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. “What’d he say about that?”

“Some guy in a Tim Hortons uniform was out back when the shooting happened. ‘I wish the fucking cops would find him.’ Those are his exact words.”

“He say anything else?”

“No. Just that he was going to turn me from a being skinny little brown runt into a muscle machine.” Darvesh grinned at Greene. He was a good cop and smart enough to enjoy what he could from this assignment.

“Well then,” Greene said, “I guess there’s no hurry to get you out of there.”

CFL.

For most people in Canada the letters stood for “Canadian Football League.”

But for cops, they also meant “Constable for Life.” That was their term for officers such as PC Arnold Lindsmore, metro Toronto police, badge number 1997, from 52 Division, a cop whose career had flatlined.

Daniel Kennicott had learned to recognize the telltale sign of a CFL from an officer’s badge number and rank. Lindsmore’s number, 1997, was low, which meant he’d been on the force for a long time. And he was still a PC, police constable. The lowest rank. In other words, he’d never been promoted. That made him a classic CFL.